On Sunday 28th February, Tuesday, nearly 140 MPs and peers have written to Foreign Secretary urging Dominic Raab to do more to secure the release of a young Sikh man from Scotland and facing the death penalty in India. The letter appears after a confession was allegedly extracted under torture.
The letter urges Raab to accept that Jagtar Singh Johal is being detained arbitrarily, and says at least three of the charges levelled against him carried the death penalty.
In the letter the parliamentarians note, “When a British national is arbitrarily detained, tortured, and faces a potential death sentence, all on the basis of trumped-up political charges, the British government must make clear this is unacceptable. This is a moment for the UK to take a stand and bring this young British man home.”
They claimed in their letter that Johal, who has been detained for three years, is a Sikh human rights activist from Dumbarton who travelled to India in October 2017 to get married. Three weeks after his wedding, was violently arrested by plainclothes police officers in Punjab before being “bound, hooded, and bundled into a car”. “We understand that his arrest was unlawful, amounting in effect to an abduction by the state,” they wrote.
They added, after his detention, “Jagtar was brutally tortured with electricity into ‘confessing’ his involvement in an alleged conspiracy.”
Jagtar is being supported by the legal NGO Reprieve, which said the charges – of procuring arms, conspiracy to commit murder and a terrorist act – all carry the death penalty in Indian law. It has been alleged he provided £3,000 to a Sikh planning to kill members of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), a charge he denies.
In a statement to The Guardian, Reprieve deputy director Dan Dolan said, “It’s baffling that the Foreign Office hasn’t sought Jaggi’s release. We’re talking about a young British man facing a death sentence, based on nothing but a supposed confession he recorded after being tortured with electricity. It is about as clear a case of arbitrary detention as you can imagine, but the government hasn’t acted to bring him home. Why?”
