Iran: Human Rights

Debate between Matthew Offord and Tom Brake

Wednesday 11th October 2017 Westminster Hall

[Dr Matthew Offord (Hendon) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Ms Buck, and to speak in the debate; I congratulate my right hon. Friend the Member for Chipping Barnet (Theresa Villiers) on securing it. This is not the first debate we have held on Iran and human rights. We had a debate on 22 March 2017 on Iran’s influence in the middle east, and one on British-Iranian relations on 12 October 2016. I secured my own debate on human rights in Iran on 28 June 2016. It is a great disappointment that little has changed since that time. Much has already been said, so I will not repeat everything, but I will touch on some points.

The first and most important point is the report from August this year on the human rights situation in Iran, in which the UN special rapporteur on Iran, Ms Asma Jahangir, highlights the alarming deterioration of the overall human rights situation and the abuses in Iran, and reports on the numerous violations that have taken place. Those violations include the execution of juveniles, suppression of women, persecution of religious and ethnic minorities, and a systematic crackdown on women’s rights activists, human rights defenders, dissidents and their families. That the UN special rapporteur on Iran acknowledged the 1988 massacre in the report is a major achievement for the justice-seeking campaign. I pay tribute to my friends and colleagues at the National Council of Resistance of Iran, who have been campaigning vigorously on this issue and seeking for the British Government to acknowledge that it occurred.

My second point is that the human rights abuses concern not only Iranian but British citizens. Two people have already been mentioned today, but there is a third British citizen detained in Iran on spurious charges. Four Americans have been released since 2016, following the Iranian nuclear agreement, as part of a prisoner swap, but nothing similar has occurred for British citizens. Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe and Kamal Foroughi have already been mentioned, but there is a third person, a 50-year-old lady named Roya Nobakht. She is an Iranian-British housewife who was put in prison after she returned to Iran in 2013 to visit her family. Two weeks after she arrived in the country, she flew to the city of Shiraz and was arrested by cyber police at the airport. Her crime, it seems, was that, while living in the UK, she had posted on Facebook that Iran was too Islamic.

The Iranian Government put her in prison and accused her of insulting Islamic sanctities, a crime that carries the death penalty. In June 2014, she was tried by branch 28 of the revolutionary court, and sentenced to 20 years in prison, later reduced to five years. Like others, she is in poor health; she has frequent seizures and has collapsed in her cell after being denied access to medication for depression. There is a fourth Briton, whose name we do not know. We are talking about human rights not just for citizens of Iran, but for British citizens.

[Tom Brake]

I would like the hon. Gentleman’s comments on what British businesses should be worried about in trading with Iran—particularly their employees going to Iran—if the Iranians are examining people’s social media in the way he has described. What is the potential risk to them?

[Dr Offord]

That is a good question. It is a huge risk for employees of British companies, or other companies working in Iran. Their media profiles and social media posts can be examined for any evidence of what the Iranian regime may wish to hold against them, or indeed their company. They may find themselves in some ways hostages to the trading activities of their companies. That is a great problem, but I believe that, as the right hon. Gentleman has said, we should not relegate human rights in favour of trade deals. That remains a great concern.

It has been more than two years since the Iranian nuclear deal was signed, yet human rights abuses in Iran have persisted, including the detention of British citizens and the denial of their basic rights, as well as Iran’s regional ambitions and sponsorship of terrorist groups such as Hezbollah. Indeed, Hansard reflects the comments I have made on Yemen, Hezbollah, Syria and other parts of the middle east where the Iranian nuclear deal has allowed resources to pour into those countries. I have been very critical of that. Indeed, I found it galling this morning to hear former Foreign Secretary Jack Straw defending Iran. Questions remain about Jack Straw’s involvement in extraordinary rendition—issues that we in this House have never been able to bottom out—and hearing him defend the Iranian regime is similar to listening to Harvey Weinstein talking about women’s rights. For him to speak about Iran today was greatly galling to me.

While Donald Trump may not be very popular with many people in this House or in the country more widely, I welcome his continuing to look at the Iranian nuclear deal. He will make an announcement later today on whether he will continue to agree to abide by that condition. I wish our own Foreign Secretary had not involved himself in that; it is a decision for the American President.

I have been very critical of the deal. I wish we had asked that human rights be part of the Iranian nuclear deal. We have found that there has been no progress not only in that area, but with our own people who are held in Iran, and most of all we have felt the malign influence of Iran in the middle east. Perhaps we, too, can look at that and the UK Government can decide whether we should continue to be a supporter of the agreement.

Prisoners (Voting Rights)

Debate between Matthew Offord and Tom Brake

Tuesday 11th January 2011 Westminster Hall

[Tom Brake]

The hon. Gentleman has helpfully answered my question, so the Minister does not need to respond to it. I presume that that is why the Government have not gone down the route of allowing prisoners to vote in local elections. However, they could exercise their local votes as electors on the register in the constituencies from which they originally came; it would not necessarily have to be in the locality of the prison.

What this argument is clearly about, and the hon. Member for Stretford and Urmston expressed it very well, is whether voting is an intrinsic right—a basic human right—or whether it is a right that should be forfeited when people lose their liberty. Of course prisoners lose their liberty; no one disputes that that is the appropriate response to a crime. However, to what extent do they lose other liberties that are associated with being a citizen? There are certain responsibilities that they retain. For example, prisoners pay capital gains tax on any capital gains transactions that they might be involved in and they pay tax on their savings. They are, therefore, making contributions that other citizens make, so to what extent do we inflict civic death on them and include withdrawing their right to vote as well as other aspects of their liberty?

[Mr Offord]

The picture that the hon. Gentleman paints is of prisoners being like the fictional characters of Andy Dufresne or Norman Fletcher—I am talking about paying capital gains tax and other tax. However, if we look at someone like John Hirst, who was originally convicted and sentenced to 15 years, we will find that he served another 10 years for his behaviour in prison. That shows that not only was he not a model prisoner when he was in prison, but he was not a contributor to society when he was out of it. Does the hon. Gentleman not accept that some prisoners deserve to lose the kind of rights that we have been talking about?

[Tom Brake]

Of course. The hon. Gentleman has quite rightly illustrated that there are certain prisoners for whom there should be no such thing as a right to vote. They have forfeited their right, and that is appropriate. However, this debate is not black and white, but shades of grey. For some prisoners at one end of the spectrum, a one-year cut-off might be more appropriate. Equally, there are other prisoners, at the other end of the spectrum, who have forfeited any right to vote in future elections.

It is also worth considering the arguments that could be deployed against allowing some prisoners the right to vote. For example, is there any evidence that disfranchisement helps to prevent crime? I am not aware that there is any evidence that suggests that withdrawing the right to vote from prisoners helps to prevent crime. Are there any concerns about the difficulties of implementation? Certainly, the Prison Governors Association and the National Offender Management Service have no concerns about the logistical difficulties of providing votes to certain categories of prisoners. As I stated earlier, is such a change a great departure? In other words, are we moving to a system in which prisoners are, for the first time, given the right to vote? The answer is no, because remand prisoners and people in prison for contempt of court and for defaulting on fines are already eligible to vote.

To conclude, it is very clear that this is an issue in which the coalition Government are between a rock and a hard place. The European Court ruling is clear. The Government, who are potentially at risk from compensation claims, have to take action within the framework of the law. I look forward to hearing the Minister’s response on some of these issues of detail and on how the Government arrived at the particular threshold that they have chosen.