By Richard Ratcliffe
This time last year I was camped outside the Foreign Office on a cold hunger strike over the UK Government’s failure to bring back my wife, Nazanin, from Iran.
A year on and Nazanin is now back at home. And I’m back on Whitehall protesting on behalf of another British national wrongly imprisoned abroad, who our Government is also failing.
This week marks the fifth anniversary of Scottish blogger Jagtar Singh Johal’s abduction by Indian authorities while on his honeymoon. Jagtar was shopping with his wife when plain-clothed officers snatched him off the street. For ten days he was held incommunicado with no access to a lawyer, his family members, or a representative of the British High Commission. He was brutally tortured into signing a false ‘confession’.
To date, the UK Government has not properly condemned this confession or acknowledged his torture. In our family, we have our own experience of how just how accommodating the UK can be of forced confessions extracted from its citizens, and the bewildering scars this leaves. At least, they called for Nazanin’s release, something they are yet to do for Jagtar.
Read the full article at the Scotsman.