This op-ed by Reprieve’s head of communications Andrew Purcell appeared in LBC on 01/05/2025.
It has now been 2,736 days since Jagtar Singh Johal was snatched off the street on his honeymoon in India, in front of his wife, and bundled into an unmarked van.
Or to put it another way, more than seven years since the torture of this young British citizen began, first with electricity and threats to burn him alive, and ever since with a sham legal process, designed to keep him imprisoned indefinitely for the ‘crime’ of standing up for human rights.
At the family home in Dumbarton, just outside Glasgow, his brother Gurpreet keeps a tally of how long it’s been, and not a single day passes without Gurpreet fighting to bring Jagtar home. If only we could say the same of the UK Government.
Four Conservative Prime Ministers and six Conservative Foreign Secretaries failed Jagtar, claiming airily to have “raised” his case with the Indian authorities, without making any progress or even committing to trying to bring him home.
In opposition, both Sir Keir Starmer and David Lammy said that Jagtar is arbitrarily detained, and that the government should seek his release. Now they’re the Prime Minister and Foreign Secretary… well, we’ll see. The moment of truth has arrived. It has never been clearer that only the UK Government can bring Jagtar’s nightmare to an end and bring him home.
Next Thursday, May 8, David Lammy will meet Gurpreet in Westminster for a second time, to discuss the latest developments. These can be summarised as “Jagtar has been found not guilty, but remains in prison, with no end in sight.”
On March 4 Jagtar was acquitted on all charges in a case in Punjab, after a court rejected the allegations against him made by Indian authorities. Prosecutors had seven years to build a case, but failed to produce any credible evidence linking him to the crimes he was charged with: no physical evidence, no email trail, no CCTV footage, no record of a bank transfer, no notes or recordings of telephone calls.
What they did have was some very sketchy witness statements: from a co-accused who later retracted his testimony and died in suspicious circumstances in police custody, and from a man who testified that police made him sign a blank piece of paper. Two other supposedly incriminating statements were almost identical, apparently copied and pasted. One of these men turned out to be dead, and the other couldn’t keep his story straight on the witness stand.
Unsurprisingly, the judge found Jagtar not guilty. But he didn’t walk free because he is on trial in eight essentially duplicate cases, based on the same so-called ‘confession,’ produced after he signed his name on a blank sheet of paper to stop police torturing him with electric shocks.
The central allegation in all nine cases is that Jagtar transferred money to fund a series of attacks in Punjab in 2016-17. The Indian authorities don’t claim he was directly involved in any of the attacks.
This is as clear an instance of ‘double jeopardy’ as it gets, meaning he is being tried again for the same alleged crime, having already been acquitted. This is prohibited under India’s constitution and in international law, but he remains in prison.
Officials at the jail in Delhi where he is being held responded to the acquittal by moving him to solitary confinement, under 24-hour armed guard.
Today, India’s Supreme Court was asked to consider Jagtar’s petition for bail, but in an outcome typical of the protracted legal process he is being subjected to, declined to issue a ruling, guaranteeing further delays and keeping Jagtar imprisoned. The legal maxim “justice delayed is justice denied” has rarely been more apposite. Trials brought under India’s Unlawful Activities Prevention Act often take decades to reach a verdict.
Pressure on the UK Government to act is building. More than 100 MPs and peers wrote to the Foreign Secretary today, urging him to “act as quickly and decisively as possible” to secure Jagtar’s release.
The previous UK Government wasted years of Jagtar’s life, hiding behind the fiction that due process is possible in a case based on a torture confession. For him to remain imprisoned for decades, as duplicate trials drag on in defiance of the principle of double jeopardy, would be an obscene injustice.
The Foreign Secretary has sworn to do better than his predecessors when Britons are arbitrarily detained overseas, promising to create a ‘special envoy’ position to resolve such cases. This is welcome, but Jagtar needs action from the Government now, not in six months or a year’s time. He has already lost most of his thirties, and the first seven years of his married life. Will Mr Lammy do what it takes to bring him home, or will he fail Jagtar, like all the Foreign Secretaries before him?