Iran Detainees

Iain Duncan Smith Excerpts

Wednesday 16th March 2022 Commons Chamber

[Elizabeth Truss]

We are all very pleased that the families are able to be reunited. In dealing with the issue, on which I have been working since I became Foreign Secretary in September, there are a lot of complexities. There are difficulties in working, given the sanctions regime and given the process that needs to be gone through. Hours and hours have been put into the meetings, the phone calls and getting this right. Right up until the last minute, which came at 1 o’clock this afternoon, it has been touch and go. There is an incredible amount of complexity lying underneath what we have to do and what our counterpart Governments have to do to effect these types of change, but I am very clear that we have some excellent officials who have really done the business on the ground in Tehran.

[Sir Iain Duncan Smith (Chingford and Woodford Green) (Con)]

I congratulate my right hon. Friend the Foreign Secretary and my right hon. Friend the Minister for Europe and North America on their work in delivering this in short order after such a long period of frustration, as well as those colleagues who have been campaigning for it. Richard Ratcliffe must feel unalloyed joy today that the love that he has shown to his wife has allowed him to campaign through adversity to deliver this day. I therefore pay tribute to him completely.

As people are dying in Ukraine to fight for freedom, we are learning a lesson that surely has application here: when states behave beyond the rule of law, we need to act swiftly and immediately isolate them with sanctions. If the unlawful taking of prisoners in a case like this ever happens again, the west must unite—the whole world must unite—in immediately bringing sanctions against those countries such that the pain they feel outweighs any gain they think they may receive.

[Elizabeth Truss]

My right hon. Friend is entirely correct. That is why it is so important that the west and the wider free world have stepped up in the Ukraine crisis. For too many years we did not do enough, and blind eyes were turned to some egregious practices. For that reason, as well as working together to impose sanctions on Russia for its appalling actions in Ukraine, we are working together on the issue of unfair detention to ensure that we protect the rules-based system and defend freedom and democracy around the world.