Several media outlets covered this meeting. The best piece was on BBC News. Our press release was also picked up by the National, the Daily Record, the Press Association, Politico’s London Playbook and the Daily Express.
Our statement:
This morning, Gurpreet Singh Johal met the Foreign Secretary, Yvette Cooper, to ask how the UK Government plans to secure his brother Jagtar’s release from arbitrary detention in India.
In the eight years since Jagtar Singh Johal was abducted by police on his honeymoon and tortured until he signed a false confession, there have been eight Foreign Secretaries. The previous seven all “raised Jagtar’s case” with the Indian authorities but failed to make any meaningful progress towards bringing him home to his family in Scotland. Gurpreet has now met six Foreign Secretaries – and described today’s meeting as one of the most disappointing meetings yet.
Gurpreet Singh Johal said: “Honestly, I don’t know why I bothered taking the train down from Glasgow for this. I’ve now met six Foreign Secretaries and this is one of the most disappointing meetings yet – it felt like a significant step back. The Prime Minister made a big deal of this meeting, so to show up and hear the same empty talk is devastating.”
Reprieve’s Deputy Chief Executive Dan Dolan said: “It is very clear by now that unless the UK Government takes stronger action, Jagtar will at best spend decades in prison, in a never-ending trial with no evidence, and at worst be sentenced to death and executed. Failing to resolve this case would project terrible weakness – signalling to allies and enemies alike that they can arbitrarily detain British citizens as a point of leverage.”
Douglas McAllister MP said: “This is the eighth foreign Secretary since Jagtar was abducted and imprisoned and I want this to be the last Foreign Secretary we have to meet. I emphasised to Yvette Cooper that simply raising the case with her counterpart in India is not enough. We’ve been in government for 17 months. There’s a window of opportunity between now and next month, and what I now want to see is a greater sense of urgency. That means immediate action from the Foreign Secretary, in her new role, to bring my constituent home to Dumbarton.
Notes for editors
Jagtar was acquitted in the first case against him to reach a verdict, in March. The court found the prosecution had “miserably failed” to prove its case. The eight cases brought by India’s National Investigation Agency (NIA) are all based on the same allegation and the same torture ‘confession’. This is a clear instance of double jeopardy – being tried twice for the same alleged acts – which is prohibited under India’s constitution and in international law.
Sir Keir Starmer is the fifth Prime Minister in the eight years Jagtar has been imprisoned. He reportedly raised Jagtar’s case with India’s PM Narendra Modi when the two leaders met to sign a trade deal between their two countries in July, and then again when they met at a tech conference in Mumbai in October.
The recent releases of Alaa Abd el-Fattah from prison in Egypt and Peter and Barbie Reynolds from jail in Afghanistan show what can be achieved by diplomacy at the highest level, when there is political will to prioritise protecting British citizens arbitrarily detained overseas.
The families of detained British nationals, including Alaa and Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, recently wrote to the PM asking him to prioritise seeking Jagtar’s release.
Jagtar is a blogger from Dumbarton, in Scotland who drew attention to human rights abuses against the Sikh community in India. UN legal experts have determined that he was targeted for his human rights activism. He has now been arbitrarily detained on the basis of a torture confession for eight years, missing most of his thirties.
Jagtar was arrested on 4 November 2017, three weeks after his wedding. He and his wife were out shopping when he was abducted off the street. Jagtar was bound, hooded with a sack and bundled into a police car by officials in plain clothes. They did not have an arrest warrant.
They cases against Jagtar are all based on the same allegation and the same torture confession. In 2016 and 2017 there were a series of attacks in Punjab. Each of these is now a case with multiple co-defendants. The Indian authorities don’t claim Jagtar was involved in any of these attacks: they allege that he transferred money to fund them. That claim was rejected by the court in Punjab, after prosecutors had seven years to present credible evidence implicating Jagtar and failed to do so.
In 2021, UN legal experts concluded that the “continued pre-trial detention of Mr. Johal lacks legal basis, and is arbitrary” because he was abducted by plainclothes officers without an arrest warrant, denied consular assistance and interrogated without a lawyer and in incommunicado detention. They found that “Mr. Johal was deprived of his liberty on discriminatory grounds, owing to his status as a human rights defender and based on his political activism, religious faith and opinions.”
Trials in National Investigation Agency courts often take decades to resolve. It has been estimated that at the current pace of hearings Jagtar’s trials will reach a verdict in 40 years. So far there have been almost 400 hearings in the various cases.
The legal process is characterised by endless delays. For example, a petition filed in 2017 seeking a medical examination, a psychiatric assessment of Jagtar and legal proceedings against the officers responsible for his torture was repeatedly adjourned at the High Court of Punjab. On 27 August 2025 it was dismissed as “infructuous” because of Jagtar’s acquittal in the Moga case and “efflux of time” – despite the fact that there has been no investigation of Jagtar’s torture claims, the officers responsible have not been held accountable, and the remaining eight cases are all based on the same so-called confession Jagtar signed on a blank piece of paper after police repeatedly electrocuted him and threatened to burn him alive.
In May, a group of more than 100 parliamentarians wrote to then Foreign Secretary, David Lammy, demanding decisive UK Government action to secure Jagtar’s release. The same day, India’s Supreme Court declined to hear Jagtar’s petition for bail.