From Egypt to India, five jailed men who feel abandoned by Britain

Alaa Abd el-Fattah, Egypt

Alaa Abd el-Fattah, an activist and computer programmer, is arguably the most high-profile political prisoner in the Arab world, incarcerated for spreading false news and endangering national security.

A key figure in Egypt’s 2011 uprising that overthrew the former dictator, Hosni Mubarak, he became known for his activism and writing about countering authoritarianism. His collection of essays and reflections, You Have Not Been Defeated, was in large part written from prison and smuggled out by friends. “I’m in prison because the authorities want to make an example of us. So let us be an example, but of our own choosing. Let us be an example, and not a warning,” he wrote in one.

Abd el-Fattah has had many extended spells in jail but was last detained in 2019, when authorities swept up well-known activists during anti-government protests. After two years of being held without trial, in December 2021, he was sentenced by Egypt’s emergency state security court to five years for sharing a Facebook post about human rights violations in prison.

He has since been moved to Wadi al-Natrun prison in Cairo, where his family say he has been denied access to fresh air, sunlight, adequate clothing and personal belongings. Despite acquiring UK citizenship through his British-born mother in 2021, he has been denied consular visits.

His family expected him to be released in September this year, but the authorities ruled that the two years he served in pre-trial detention did not count as time served. His mother has begun a hunger strike. His sister, Mona Seif, believes the Egyptian president, Abdel Farrah el-Sisi, has a personal grudge against him.

This month, a group of 15 British and Egyptian NGOs wrote to the UK Foreign Office to ask that it insists that economic ties with Egypt cannot be strengthened while Abd el-Fattah remains in jail, something the foreign secretary, David Lammy, advocated when in opposition.

They point out Egypt is pushing to secure new British investment, with senior ministers and investors visiting the UK, and talk of a British-Egyptian investment conference.

Jimmy Lai, Hong Kong

Lai has been in a Hong Kong jail cell for almost four years. The media mogul and pro-democracy activist was arrested in 2020 on charges related to the 2019 mass protests that rocked the city. Later that year, he was arrested again, by national security police who raided the newspaper he founded, Apple Daily. They accused Lai of colluding with foreign forces in breach of the national security law introduced that year. Chinese officials have called him a “mastermind and instigator of anti-China riots”.

Lai’s bail was revoked months later and he was held on remand. That rolled into a sentence for “unlawful assembly” convictions related to the 2019 protests and Tiananmen massacre vigils. He is now serving another sentence of more than five years for a lease violation, which critics have called a trumped-up charge designed to keep the influential activist behind bars.

He is being held in solitary confinement, where his lawyers say he sees daylight only through windows in the corridor outside his cell and is taken out once a day for an hour’s exercise. The committed Catholic has not received communion while detained, which his son, Sebastien, describes as “petty”.

His trial resumed last week after multiple delays and government interventions, including efforts to bar a UK lawyer, Timothy Owen, from representing him. He is facing a life sentence if convicted, but even a few extra years are of concern for Lai, 76. “He’s not doing well, unfortunately,” said Sebastien Lai, who is lobbying western governments to help release his father. “His health has gotten much worse, and he was too sick to go to court a few months ago.”

Lai is a full UK citizen who has only ever held English papers. Receiving British national (overseas) status was “the first time any state recognised him as a person”, his son says.

But he and others say the UK government’s support has been “ridiculously” lacking, far behind those of other countries such as the US, Canada and Australia, which have lobbied for him.

“It took two years before [the UK] started asking for consular access,” said Mark Sabah, the director of the London-based Committee for Freedom in Hong Kong. “Two years before they even said his name at the dispatch box.”

Sebastien Lai said the call from Lammy for Lai’s release while on a visit to China last month was welcome, but he wants his father’s case raised in all government engagements with Beijing.

Ryan Cornelius, the United Arab Emirates

More than 16 years have passed since Ryan Cornelius, a British property developer, was arrested at Dubai airport. He is now 70, and his family is furious about the UK government’s response to his case.

Cornelius was charged in 2010 with defrauding the Dubai Islamic Bank (DIB) and sentenced to 10 years in prison in the UAE.

Two months before his release date in 2018, he was served with another 20-year sentence – based on a UAE law brought in after his initial sentencing – until $430m in alleged debt was settled. Before his detention, Cornelius, who had business projects in Bahrain, Dubai and Pakistan, had been repaying instalments on a $500m DIB loan.

At the start of his imprisonment, he was held in solitary confinement for weeks, and he later contracted tuberculosis while in jail, which went untreated for 18 months, his family said.

A meeting this year with the Conservative foreign secretary David Cameron, who raised Cornelius’s case with UAE officials, made them hopeful for the first time of his release. But meetings with officials from the new Labour government have upset and disappointed them.

The businessman’s lawyer, Rhys Davies, said: “David Cameron’s intervention was an absolute game changer. Since the new government’s come in it’s gone in completely the opposite direction.”

“Their job is to stand up for the rights of British citizens, that should be their number one priority and I just don’t think they’re doing that. Ryan should have been released earlier this year, there’s no doubt about it.”

Cornelius’s wife, Heather, said: “Brian is a human being, and his family are human beings. They need some kind of help and support and some rights in this world. If you can’t get them from the British government, who can you get it from?”

His brother-in-law, Chris Pagett, said the UK had “many diplomatic instruments” at its disposal, including sanctions, “precisely in order to protect British citizens from this kind of autocratic thuggery. If you are seen to be unwilling to use them, the only thing that is certain is that there will be many more Ryans, and this makes the world a far less safe place,” he added.

The Foreign Office said it was supporting Cornelius, and met his family to discuss their concerns last month.

Mehran Raoof, Iran

In October 2020, Mehran Raoof was arrested in Tehran. The following year, the British-Iranian trade unionist and labour rights activist was sentenced to over 10 years’ imprisonment on national security-related charges.

For years until his arrest, the former teacher from north London had divided his time between the UK and Iran, teaching English, meeting other labour and women’s rights activists and helping them translate materials from and into English.

He says he was not told of the reasons for his arrest or the charges against him at the time, and was denied legal access until the day of his trial. He was convicted of “forming a group of more than two people with the purpose of disrupting national security” and “spreading propaganda against the system”, and remains incarcerated in Iran’s notorious Evin prison.

Raoof’s fellow trade union activist Satar Rahmani said Raoof had been subjected to lengthy interrogation and mental and physical harassment in jail, and was denied medical treatment for diabetes.

He has no immediate family in Iran, and for several months his relatives were “completely unaware” of his whereabouts.

Getting information about Raoof’s wellbeing in prison has been a challenge, said the Amnesty International campaigner Sena Atici. The organisation, which considers Raoof a prisoner of conscience, has called on the UK government to secure his release.

In 2020, the Foreign Office said his family was being supported and the case would continue to be raised “at the most senior levels”. But Liz Truss, then foreign secretary, reportedly made no reference to him in a 2022 announcement on the release of two other Iran detainees, Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe and Anoosheh Ashoori. Pressed by Raoof’s MP, Jeremy Corbyn, Truss said: “I must respect the individual’s request of whether their case should be raised in public.”

Rahmani said no such request was made. He said the new Labour government had met Raoof’s family, and Starmer had raised his case with Iran’s new prime minister, Masoud Pezeshkian, including requesting a visit by a British embassy official.

A Foreign Office spokesperson said: “We have raised Mr Raoof’s health and welfare concerns with the Iranian government and his welfare remains a top priority.”

Jagtar Singh Johal, India

Jagtar Singh Johal, a Sikh activist and blogger from Dumbarton in Scotland, was arrested in 2017 while attending a wedding in the Punjab.

He is accused as a co-conspirator in the murders of three far-right Hindu leaders and the funding of the Khalistan Liberation Front. One of the charges is that he travelled to France in 2013 to hand over £3,000 to a co-conspirator, knowing the money would be used to fund a series of attacks against Hindu nationalists and other religious leaders in Punjab.

He claims that soon after his arrest he was tortured into signing confessions. Over time, further charges were added, including some as late as 2021. He is now being held at Tihar jail, Delhi.

In November 2021, a United Nations working party said Johal, now 37, had been arrested because of his Sikh activism. In February 2023, Starmer said there was no legal basis for Johal’s detention and the government must act decisively to negotiate his release.

Jagtar Singh Johal’s brother, Gurpreet Singh Johal, said Johal was a peaceful activist who had contributed to a website remembering the 1984 massacre at the Golden Temple at Amritsar but was not a militant.

Although he has appeared in court numerous times alongside other co-conspirators, nothing but stock witnesses have been produced against him, he said. One of the witnesses critical to the prosecution case has since died.

Gurpreet Singh Johal said: “My brother should not be in prison. All he ever did was stand up for human rights, as we have said from day one. Prosecutors can’t come up with any evidence against him because there isn’t any.”