Assurances by a UK minister that a British man imprisoned in India will receive a fair trial fly in the face of evidence that he has been tortured and arbitrarily detained, three lawyers who held senior public roles have warned.
To coincide with the sixth anniversary of Jagtar Singh Johal’s detention, Ken MacDonald KC, Elish Angiolini KC and Jim Wallace KC have written to the UK Foreign Office minister Lord Ahmad asking him to retract his recent comments saying that the British citizen would receive “due process” in India.
Lord MacDonald, a former director of public prosecutions for England and Wales, and Lady Angiolini and Lord Wallace, who were lord advocate and advocate general respectively for Scotland, say “there can be no due process where proceedings have been tainted by torture”, or where charges are politically motivated and punish freedom of expression.
Johal, a Sikh activist and blogger from Dumbarton, Scotland, was in India in 2017 to get married when he was seized by plainclothes officers in front of his wife, hooded, bundled into a car and tortured, according to the campaign group Reprieve. It says the Indian authorities appear to have acted on a tip-off from UK intelligence.
The then prime minister, Boris Johnson, said the Indian government was arbitrarily detaining Johal, a position shared by the UN working group on arbitrary detention, but the government has been accused of since backsliding on its stance.
In a debate about Johal’s case in the House of Lords in September, Ahmad said the UK would not call for the release of an individual or interfere in another country’s legal process “where a due process is being followed”.
In their letter to Ahmad, MacDonald and Wallace write: “There is no possibility of due process in Jagtar’s case, which is based around a so-called confession obtained under days of brutal torture. The UK government has acknowledged Jagtar’s serious allegations of torture by state officials whilst in pre-trial detention, including electrocution, beatings, stress positions and threats to burn him alive. To bring an end to the torture, Jagtar was forced to sign blank pieces of paper, subsequently represented by the authorities as a ‘confession’. This is the primary basis for his continued detention.”
Johal faces terrorism charges in connection with killings by the Khalistan Liberation Force (KLF), a banned terrorist organisation, of which he is alleged to be a member. The peers’ letter says that in the six years he has been in jail, no credible evidence has been forthcoming, and it calls on Ahmad to retract his “unsustainable” comments about due process.
In September, Johal’s MP, Martin Docherty-Hughes, accused Rishi Sunak of prioritising a trade deal with India over Johal’s release, after a letter from Ahmad said the government would not call for his release, claiming that taking such a position would not be in his best interests.
Johal’s brother, Gurpreet, said: “My brother’s trial is a sham and the prime minister and foreign secretary know it. They won’t do what it takes to bring him home, so they come up with excuses. It’s been six years of endless delays, and while prosecutors drag the process out without presenting any credible evidence, Jagtar is slowly dying in an Indian jail.”
A Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office spokesperson said it was committed to resolving Johal’s case “as soon as possible”.
They added: “We continue to provide consular assistance to Mr Johal and his family and have consistently raised his case directly with the government of India.”
