Consular Support for British Citizens

Debate between Tulip Siddiq and Hannah Bardell

Thursday 9th December 2021 Commons Chamber

[Hannah Bardell (Livingston) (SNP)]

I beg to move,

That this House regrets that the consular services provided by the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO) to bereaved families of people who have been murdered, have died in suspicious circumstances, or have been imprisoned or tortured overseas have fallen short of the standard reasonably expected; notes that access to justice and basic standards of assistance are dependent upon a person’s ability to pay; is concerned that there is no legal right to consular assistance and that support is provided on a discretionary basis, which can lead to unpredictable and inconsistent communications from the FCDO; further regrets that consular services in the UK are below the level of support UK citizens should expect; believes that the FCDO’s focus is on what it cannot do to help, rather than what it can do, which adds to the trauma experienced by victims; calls on the Government to improve and standardise communication processes at the FCDO, to publish consular procedures and policies and to revisit the findings of the Fifth Report of the Foreign Affairs Committee, Support for British nationals abroad: The Consular Service, Session 2014-15, HC 516; further calls on the Government to consult with the families affected and to raise the standard of how British citizens are treated by FCDO procedures; and urges the Government to set a world leading example of how a state treats its citizens in their darkest hour of need.

It is a great privilege and pleasure to move this motion on a very serious issue: consular support for British citizens. If the Chair will allow me, I would like to share the experience of someone whose loved one died abroad. You’ve gone to Paris for the weekend. It is your husband’s birthday and you are going to celebrate. You get to Paris and you’re having a lovely time. Your son and daughter and their partners are with you. Between the restaurant and the hotel, your husband is attacked at random. He didn’t see it coming, none of you did, and he was so brutally beaten that he was taken to hospital and put on a life support machine. Your son and son-in-law were also attacked and taken to the hospital. You arrived at the hospital to find you could not understand the language. You were asked to sign a document but it wasn’t in English. You couldn’t read it and you were panicking as it related to your husband’s care. You’re in shock. It’s night time. It’s dark. What do you do? You decide to call the British embassy—they’ll know what to do. But it’s closed because it’s Saturday night and not open again until Monday.

Monday comes and your husband’s life support machine has been turned off. You didn’t get a choice in the matter. The rules are different in France to the UK. You are devastated. Your husband, whose birthday you were coming to celebrate, has been murdered. You manage to contact the embassy on Monday, and they tell you they’re sorry to hear what’s happened but they can’t help you and you’ll need to find a lawyer. They agree to send you a list though, and you get a piece of paper with some names in French and phone numbers. You ring the first one. You try to explain your husband has been murdered, and the lawyer on the other end tells you he is too busy to take the case. Your daughter calls the next one, and they ask for €1,000 up front and all documents in the case. You go to the hospital, where you are handed a report, but you can’t read it because it’s in French. You call the embassy, who say they don’t deal with translation and you’ll need to organise that yourself.

You go to the police station, where no one can tell you what will happen next and whether the criminals who attacked your family will be traced. You tell them what happened, and are asked to sign a document that you can’t read. You ask for a translation, and they cannot help you. You need to get back home because you can’t afford to stay. You don’t want to leave your husband and your son, because he is still in intensive care. Someone pleasant at the embassy agrees to drive you to the airport. They tell you that that’s not part of their job description and they’re doing it as a favour because they feel sorry for you, but please do not mention it to anyone.

You get back to London. Queuing for the flight check-in, you have two suitcases: yours and your husband’s. When you get to the desk, you are told there will be a charge because you have extra luggage. On the flight, someone from the airline announces, “Welcome on board. We hope you enjoyed your trip.” You get home, you call the Foreign Office. Someone asks you to explain what’s happened, and you give them the details and have to re-live it all. They say they aren’t the person who can help but someone will ring you back tomorrow. The next day, no one phones.

You call back and get someone else who asks you to go through the story again. They ask whether you had insurance and whether you plan to get the body home or not. If you do not have insurance, you will have to find the money for repatriation yourself, but you will need to speak to a funeral director about that, and they will send you a bereavement pack—“What’s your email address?” After you have called your insurance company, you call the funeral director to go through organising repatriation. Imagine for just a second that you do not have insurance and instead have to set up a crowdfunding page to ask any generous members of the public for enough to get your partner back so that you can have a funeral.

You were due back to work on Monday. You do not know what your own name is or what day of the week it is, let alone are able to go to work, so you arrange to see your GP, who signs you off sick. You cannot work and your husband was the main source of income in your household. The French lawyer is asking lots of questions and spending a lot of time on your case, and you want justice, so there are legal fees, travel and a lot of stress and trauma ahead. You feel so alone. This cannot be right.

You are at home now and you are watching the news of a young girl who has fallen from a balcony in suspicious circumstances overseas. The news presenter says, “We asked the Foreign Office for comment and they said, ‘We’re assisting the family at this difficult time.’” You wonder what assistance they are getting that you are not. You decide to set up your own charity to ensure that families are supported in future. It is too late for yours, but God forbid some other poor family has to suffer this alone. Let us make sure this does not happen again.

Murdered Abroad was set up in 2001 by Eve Henderson. Death Abroad You’re Not Alone was set up in 2013 by Julie Love, whose son Colin tragically drowned in water that was deemed safe off the coast of a Venezuelan island. The Kirsty Maxwell Charity was set up by my constituents Brian and Denise Curry, Kirsty’s parents, who want to help others who suffer such a traumatic loss of a loved one abroad. The Lucie Blackman Trust was formed after the brutal attack on Lucie Blackman in Japan in 2000. The Jessica Lawson Retreat was set up by her family as a retreat for those bereaved after Jessica tragically drowned on a school trip in France in 2015, and they continue to campaign on water-safety issues. The British Rights Abroad Group was set up by the families of Nazanin Zaghari-Radcliffe and Matthew Hedges to campaign for and represent the families of those held illegally abroad.

All those are services set up by families who are devastated by the loss or incarceration of a loved one, and they are now plugging the Government’s gaps. They do incredible work, and I pay tribute to them. There will always be a place for such charities and organisations, but they should not have to be picking up the pieces of a Government’s failings.

[Tulip Siddiq (Hampstead and Kilburn) (Lab)]

I am sorry to interrupt the hon. Member’s powerful speech, but I thank her for securing this debate. She knows very well the case of my constituent, Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, having spoken in support of her release in several debates. The hon. Lady may be aware that the Government granted Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe diplomatic protection in 2019, but three years on almost nothing has been done to use the protection that was bestowed on her to bring her home. The Government have been unwilling to assert their right to consular access to Nazanin, to challenge Iran’s unlawful behaviour at the International Court of Justice, or to use their right under the Vienna convention to request private consular meetings with the Iranian regime. Does the hon. Member agree that the Government risk undermining the UK’s diplomatic protection by failing to utilise it in my constituent’s case?

[Hannah Bardell]

I thank the hon. Lady for that intervention and pay tribute to her work on behalf of Nazanin, Richard and their family. I wholeheartedly agree with her and will address some of those points in my speech.

The experience that I just shared with the Chamber is just one of the many devastating accounts that I have heard since I started to work on this issue. Let me take a moment to thank the Backbench Business Committee and all who will speak today and who have supported this work. I give thanks to Eve Henderson of Murdered Abroad, to Julie Love of Death Abroad You’re Not Alone, to Redress, to Miles Manning, to Stewarts Law, to the British Rights Abroad Group and to all who have contributed to the preparation for today and who, in their own ways, advocate for different parts of the broader issue we are debating.

I also thank, if the House will indulge me for just a moment, my constituency team, who have worked tirelessly on this issue. When we set up the all-party group on deaths abroad, consular services and assistance, we did not deploy an organisation to support us because we felt the issue was too sensitive, so my own team has taken evidence and worked on this issue. I thank Marcus Woods, Sabrina Rossetti, Chloe McLellan and Adam Robinson, and specifically Stephanie McTighe, my chief of staff, and Michelle Rodger, my former comms manager. Michelle passed away from cancer in August this year. She believed passionately in this work and in this issue. She is much missed by all in my team.

When we founded the all-party group and took evidence from more than 60 families and 30 organisations, Michelle was very much at the heart of this work. She sat in on every session, diligently recording and taking note of the devastating experiences and making sure that they were properly reflected in the report that we wrote and published at the end of 2019. Why did we do that? It was because, like all Members across this House, I have constituents who have been left devastated by the murder, suspicious death, incarceration or loss of a family member abroad. In their time of most desperate need, they face a lack of support from the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office.

Julie Pearson was killed in Israel in 2015 and Kirsty Maxwell was killed in Benidorm, Spain, in 2016. They were two devastating constituency cases of young women taken in their prime in the most distressing and violent ways imaginable and the families were left without the support they needed. The families coming forward to get support highlighted the issue to me. I come to this debate and indeed these issues genuinely in the spirit of co-operation, as a critical friend. I genuinely want to work with Government to make the system better for families, consular staff, civil servants and all those whose lives are touched by this issue. It is those families who are really at the heart of the all-party group’s work. I thank all of them for the time that they have spent with my team and me. They have given evidence and shared their traumatic experiences, and they live with a huge gap in their lives.

Family members of those who are killed overseas without travel insurance to cover repatriation are, in many cases, left to crowdfund to repatriate the body of their loved one. Every time I see one of these crowdfunders pop up, my heart sinks because I just know, from having spoken to the families that we have worked with, what they are facing. If a loved one is murdered overseas, it is estimated that it could cost anything up to £60,000. Criminal injuries compensation is available only if the murderer was in the UK, or unless the murder abroad was by means of a terrorist attack. To be clear, there are around only 300 suspicious deaths abroad every year. Obviously, that number has been significantly different recently because of the pandemic, but as things open up—or do not open up, depending on where we will be—we have to recognise the challenges in front of us.

The House and those watching may be interested and glad to know that terror attack victims are given an immediate payment of around £3,000 and then, I believe, more payments further down the line. Repatriation is handled and paid for by the Government. I recognise that we have not taken evidence from victims of terror attacks, and I understand that many have raised concerns with the level of support in what we can only imagine are some of the most devastating of circumstances.

From the many families that we have spoken to, we have heard of spiralling costs because of the need to pay for the translation of documents, the cost of legal representation, accommodation and travel. Dame Vera Baird, in her 2019 report, “Struggling for Justice”, raised many of these issues and the need for financial support for victims’ families.

I ask the Government to please ensure that murder victims overseas get parity with terrorist victims and that the criminal injuries compensation scheme is amended accordingly. If we can provide those services when someone is killed in a terrorist attack, why can we not offer them to those who are killed in suspicious circumstances abroad? Those services are there, let us extend them. I ask the FCDO and the Ministry of Justice, which fund the victim support homicide service, to please make transparent the assessment about who gets help and what that looks like, because, at the moment, families fall down the gaps of eligibility far too often and are re-traumatised by the process of just seeking help. The FCDO states in its guidance:

“There is no legal right to consular assistance. All assistance provided is at our discretion.”

It does prompt the question, given that these are our citizens—our ain folk—why would we not offer that service on a mandatory and consistent basis. What are the arguments for not offering it? The former Minster for Asia, Mark Field, said:

“Consular assistance is central to our work at the FCO.”—[Official Report, 13 March 2018; Vol. 637, c. 306WH.]

Those two things—that consular assistance is central to the FCDO’s work and that it has no obligation to provide it—makes it seem as if the FCDO is somewhat conflicted within itself about what support it offers to its own citizens. I ask the Government whether they will enshrine in law a right to consular assistance, and if not, why not. Our citizens need clarity and they need transparency. After all, the first duty of any Government should be to protect their citizens.

A lot has been made of global Britain and Britain’s greatness. It is not so great, however, when it comes to helping its own citizens. We have evidence that families in their darkest hour are left without the right help, resource or support—as, indeed, are consular staff—to help them to deal with the death or detainment of their loved ones. Only this week, we heard of the gross failings of the FCDO during the evacuation of Afghanistan. In 2019, it was reported that the number of Foreign Office staff had fallen by more than 1,000 in the last 30 years. In a 2015 report, the Foreign Affairs Committee said that budget cuts and low pay at the Foreign Office were endangering the UK’s global role and could have a “disastrous and costly” effect on the Government’s ability to make informed judgments on critical issues, and

“the cuts imposed on the FCO since 2010 have been severe and have gone beyond just trimming fat: capacity now appears to be being damaged.”

Fewer people are under greater pressure and doing more of the work, with less resources; that is terrifying.

The staff need the help and support to do their job properly, Minister, please make these changes, for the families of loved ones, but also for the staff in the Department’s own service. The bereavement pack that the Foreign Office provides does not say that people killed in suspicious circumstances abroad may well fall through a gap because even the murder and manslaughter team at the FCDO will not be able to take the case, so it will be left with a general country casework team that is staffed by junior members of the Foreign Office, who may not have the relevant experience or resources to support a family. It must be incredibly difficult and traumatic for those staff who are dealing with such cases.

In 2014, the Foreign Affairs Committee review recommended that the Foreign Office needed an access to justice unit, but that access to justice unit was renamed and became the murder and manslaughter team, purely because it was deemed too difficult to deal with cases of suspicious death. If it is too difficult for a Government Department that deploys thousands of bright minds, where does that leave an individual family who fall through the cracks? Will the Government revisit this access to justice unit or a similar unit dedicated to cases of suspicious death overseas?

I get how difficult these issues are; I worked for the US Department of State in its Edinburgh consulate, and saw at first hand how hard being a consular officer was. I also saw prisoners being visited regularly and checked on, regardless of their crime—because it was the right thing to do. When a US citizen died, I saw families met at the airport, not as a favour to keep under the radar but because it was the right thing to do. I saw staff co-ordinating with local police and taking a compassionate and trauma-informed approach.

The families we have met and taken evidence from— I would dearly love to name them all individually, but I just do not have time—have touched my team and me for ever. I invite the Minister to spend some time in their company to understand and hear from them, and I suggest that consular staff do the same in the course of their training. My team had vicarious trauma training following the evidence sessions that we held, as that was recommended and necessary. I fear for the consular staff and the staff retention at the FCDO, particularly in the murder and manslaughter team, who are doing the very best they can in some of the most difficult circumstances. Who is looking after them and training them, and does it work for families? Only recently, I heard of a family not being called back. There is clearly a staffing issue and an issue with levels of service.

We have experienced and trained police, senior investigating officers and homicide teams, yet they are not being connected with families who need the benefit of their knowledge. There are lawyers and police officers offering their time, pro bono, to help in these cases. The help is here in the UK and it is possible, but we are not doing more to join these people up. Doing so costs nothing, but makes a huge difference. Will the Government work with the all-party parliamentary group to explore working with professionals in this area across these islands, and join them up with those who need the benefit of their knowledge? Lawyers lists need quality control and people need more support.

For those imprisoned abroad and held illegally, many of these issues are similar and deeply distressing. Many of my colleagues, including my hon. Friends the Members for West Dunbartonshire (Martin Docherty-Hughes) and for Glasgow North (Patrick Grady), have worked on issues and fought hard for their constituents, as has the hon. Member for Hampstead and Kilburn (Tulip Siddiq), who is not in her place now. A legal right to consular assistance is so important to these people.

I want to pay tribute to the founding members of the British Rights Abroad Group, who have experienced their loved ones being held abroad. Richard Ratcliffe and Daniela Tajeda have fought valiantly for their loved one. Nazanin is still, as we have heard, being held in Iran away from her daughter and family. Although Daniela’s husband, Matthew Hedges, is now home from being held in the UAE, his experience of illegal incarceration was horrific. I have spent time with Daniela. I have heard what Matthew went through when he was held in a windowless room and force-fed drugs that have left long-term mental and physical damage. Daniela was left to fight for Matthew alone with very little support from the UK Government. She was advised not to go to the press but then left completely isolated. That was a completely unacceptable situation. I genuinely believe that if she had had the right consular support, she and Matthew would not have been as damaged and as traumatised as they have been.

There are more than 2,000 British prisoners abroad. More than half of them are currently being held without trial, like Jagtar Singh Johal, a constituent of the hon. Member for Hampstead and Kilburn, who has been held prisoner in India for nearly four years on unfounded terrorism charges, and Billy Irving, who spent four years in an Indian prison after being wrongly accused of carrying unlicensed arms and ammunition while he countered piracy—with the British Government’s authorisation and support.

There is so much to say and so much to do on this issue, with so many lives lost and impacted, and so many still fighting for justice for their loved ones. I want to give others a chance to speak, but I also want to be very clear with the Government and with the families: I, and my team, will continue to fight on this issue, and we want to work with you to make it better. We will not give up the fight on this issue for those families and for those staff.