British Nationals Murdered Abroad: Support for Families

Steff Aquarone Excerpts

Monday 12th May 2025 Commons Chamber

[Mr Reynolds]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for his intervention, and for talking about Rob and his family. It is really important that the Government step up and support families, where they need it. Families need consistent advice, and to know that they have someone to turn to.

That brings me on nicely to my next point, which is about the consistency of support for families through consular services. Some describe consular services overseas as being provided by really positive, empathetic individuals who go out of their way to help, but far too many tell me about being passed from person to person, receiving contradictory advice, having emails ignored and being made to feel more like a burden than a bereaved family in need of care. The inconsistency is one of the crucial failings, because there is no statutory duty on the Government to provide a minimum standard of support to families in such circumstances. The level of help depends on the consulate involved, which official picks up the phone, and which country the incident occurs in. It is a passport lottery.

I want to mention some real people and highlight how they feel they have been failed. Eve Henderson’s husband Roderick was killed in France in 1997. She encountered immediate language barriers and a completely different judicial process that no one explained to her and no one helped her navigate.

Brian Chandler’s grandson Liam was killed in Greece in 2006. He was pushed from a fourth-floor balcony by his own father, a British national. The perpetrator admitted what he had done, yet the Greek court found him not guilty because of a psychiatric episode. For Liam’s family, the experience of sitting through the trial in a foreign language and trying to understand the complex legal arguments with no help was traumatic and bewildering. The fact that the case involved a British perpetrator makes it all the more difficult to understand why British authorities provided no support.

Brenda’s brother Howard was killed in Australia in 1999. She faced an enormous barrier of distance. Attending the trial meant significant cost, time off work and personal sacrifice. No financial assistance or practical help was offered. She had to choose between justice and affordability—an impossible choice that no grieving family should ever have to make.

Alyssa’s sister Vanessa was killed in Thailand in 2004. Alyssa faced a perfect storm of challenges: the language barrier, cultural differences, geographical distance and an unfamiliar legal system. She had no understanding of how Thai courts operated and no guidance on how to follow proceedings, and it quickly became a nightmare. Those are not isolated incidents; they are emblematic of a broken and inconsistent system.

[Steff Aquarone (North Norfolk) (LD)]

I congratulate my hon. Friend on securing this debate. Dr Ding Col Dau Ding was raised and educated in North Norfolk and became a neurosurgeon before travelling to South Sudan to practise medicine and save lives. In 2017, he was found dead in his family’s flat, and they believe that he was murdered. The official Government narrative is that he died by suicide or misadventure, but there is significant evidence to dispute that. Does my hon. Friend agree that there is an extra challenge for families whose loved ones are murdered abroad when they also have to challenge the authorities, and that the Foreign Office should support them in their fight for justice?

[Mr Reynolds]

I thank my hon. Friend for his intervention. It is incredibly important that the authorities provide that extra support.

One thing that families have told me makes a real difference is the peer support that they can get from other families who have walked the path, and who can offer reassurance, practical advice and emotional understanding that no bureaucrat or leaflet ever could. These support networks, like Murdered Abroad, are under-resourced and often disconnected from formal consular processes. They are run by volunteers—by the bereaved themselves—who have taken on this work not because they are asked to, but because nobody else would. It is time we supported them and recognised their work, because that is what we are here to do. We need a clear, comprehensive statutory framework of support for families of British citizens murdered abroad. I am calling on the Government to commit to eight key reforms. First, there needs to be a statutory duty to provide consistent and timely communication to bereaved families. Every family should have a named point of contact and regular updates, not a revolving door of anonymous officials and faceless email inboxes. Secondly, key documents must be translated into English. No family should be forced to hire their own translator through crowdfunding or use up all their savings just to understand how their loved one died.

Thirdly, there needs to be accessible guidance on the foreign country’s judicial process, including information about how criminal investigations work, trial expectations, timelines and victim rights. This information should be publicly accessible. Fourthly, there must be a list of verified legal support that makes it clear what kind of cases the legal experts handle and whether they speak English. Fifthly, we need improved co-operation between British and foreign authorities as well as police liaison and information sharing. The UK must be proactive in ensuring that our citizens’ cases are not allowed to stall for long periods of time.

Sixthly, families should have support to attend foreign trials, including financial assistance where it is desperately needed, logistical help and trauma-informed briefings. Attendance at trials should be a right, not a luxury. Seventhly, we need clear co-ordination within the UK. That includes consistent advice on repatriation, clearer guidance on coroner inquests and formal links to the peer-to-peer networks that can reduce isolation and provide lived experience insight, because it can often be so different.

Finally, we need an independent complaints and review mechanism, so that when support fails, families know that they have somewhere to turn. This mechanism must include the power to investigate, recommend and drive change. These points are important, because this provision does not exist at the moment.

The loss of a loved one to murder is already the greatest pain a family can endure. That pain should not be compounded by systemic failure, indifference or confusion. The families who make up the Murdered Abroad campaign have shown courage, dignity and resolve, and not just in seeking justice for their loved ones, but in trying to ensure that no one else suffers the way that they have.

Oral Answers to Questions

Steff Aquarone Excerpts

Tuesday 22nd April 2025 Commons Chamber

[Sir Nicholas Dakin]

The hon. Gentleman is absolutely right that all those issues contribute to circumstances that might create offending, but it is really good that we have the turnaround programme in place. Only 5% of children who completed their turnaround interventions received convictions in their first year of the programme. That is an example of the sort of programme we need to be engaging in to turn young people away from crime.

[Steff Aquarone (North Norfolk) (LD)]

6. What steps she is taking to increase access to legal aid in rural areas.

[The Minister of State, Ministry of Justice (Sarah Sackman)]

Wherever they are in England and Wales, people should benefit from equal access to legal support and legal aid. Remote technology and provision of online advice present the opportunity both to democratise legal advice and to deliver it to all who need to access it. We are investing an additional £92 million to support the sustainability of the criminal legal aid sector, and we are consulting on fee increases totalling £20 million for housing and immigration to increase access to civil legal aid. All of this will support legal aid across the country, including in rural areas.

[Steff Aquarone]

North Norfolk is a legal aid desert. My residents have precious little access to family, criminal and housing legal assistance, despite the best efforts of local organisations such as the Norfolk Community Law Service. We face huge barriers to recruitment and retention in rural areas, such as the cost of housing, poor public transport and fees that, despite the uprating, are still too low. Things need to change. Will the Minister meet me and those working in the legal aid sector in North Norfolk to discuss what we can do to support those in need in areas such as mine?

[Sarah Sackman]

I thank the hon. Member for raising the issue of legal aid deserts, and I welcome his suggestion that he write to me about these things. I regularly meet legal aid providers, and that is why we are investing an additional £6 million in legal support, which provides that early advice that can make a real difference in areas such as his.

Oral Answers to Questions

Steff Aquarone Excerpts

Tuesday 10th September 2024 Commons Chamber

[Alex Davies-Jones]

First, let me congratulate my hon. Friend on succeeding me as chair of the all-party parliamentary group on perpetrators of domestic abuse. It is a vital APPG and I know that she will do sterling working as its chair.

To confirm, we have excluded from SDS40 certain offences that are frequently connected to domestic abuse, such as stalking and controlling or coercive behaviour. The victim contact scheme is available to all victims of a sexual, violent or terrorist offence where the offender is sentenced to 12 months or more in custody. We are working with the sector and others to consider how to improve communication with victims about an offender following a conviction.

[Steff Aquarone (North Norfolk) (LD)]

T6. The latest figures show that the court backlog sits at nearly 68,000. Every one of those cases means yet another individual victim or family waiting for justice. Despite that, the Government plan to cap the number of sitting days in our courts at a lower number than last year, losing 2,000 sitting days, which has drawn criticism from many, including the Bar Council. Could the Secretary of State tell me why those waiting for justice, including many in North Norfolk, are being forced to wait even longer?

[Heidi Alexander]

As I have said, the Crown court will sit for more than 105,000 days this financial year—an increase of 28% on the year before the pandemic. That means that there is more capacity in the Crown court this year than in six of the past seven years. We have inherited a criminal justice system on life support as a result of the previous Government, and we have a broken economy. Everyone can see the state of the public finances, and justice is not immune from that.