TV Features

You could immediately tell Ian Nisbett was over whelmed as he walked into the arrivals area at Heathrow airport.   He looked like a scared rabbit caught in the glare of car headlights.  That was two months ago.

When I met Nisbett last week, for a first proper conversation, he confirmed that his mind was in such a mental fog that day in March that he barely recognised his loved ones and friends.

Ian Nisbett

He’d just been released after serving four years in an Egyptian jail.   He maintains he was a victim of a miscarriage of justice.  The case against him and his alleged co-conspirators did not stand up to scrutiny says the retiring director of Fair Trials Abroad (FTA).

Stephen Jakobi believes symptoms of post-traumatic stress are often present in returnee prisoners.   He has seen more than most after setting up the FTA charity in 1993.

Jakobi was approaching retirement as a criminal lawyer when the shocking case of two British women given stiff sentences in Thailand for drug smuggling triggered this new venture. 

Jakobi was staggered at the gullibility of the British media in reporting the case.  Why on earth, he thought, would organised criminals risk losing 30kg of heroin by despatching it with novices?

The women were eventually released.   But the media interest gave his campaign against miscarriages of justice involving British citizens overseas a massive boost.  Parents, siblings and partners sought him out as the single port of call to help them in what were often desperate circumstances.   

Up until then it had proven difficult for families finding themselves in this predicament, to get legal advice from an independent source.    Prisoners abroad have rarely had a good press, unless that is they have the innocent girl next door quality.   It can be hard to drum up press interest and then maintain it over the period of a jail sentence.

In the cases of Ian Nisbett, Maajid Nawaz and Reza Pankhurst, politics played its part in ensuring they remained in the public eye.  

They were arrested in the wave of security clampdowns in Eygpt, as elsewhere in the Middle East, after the 9/11 attacks in the United States.   As the West and their Arabian allies considered invading Afghanistan to oust the Taliban in early 2002, radical Islamic groups were targeted and their members often tortured and imprisoned.

In this general trawl the three Londoners were suspected of associating with those planning the overthrow of Middle Eastern regimes.    Their membership of Hizb-ut-Tahrir in the UK was what put them under suspicion.

Although this group renounces violence it does call for the overthrow of what it sees as undemocratic regimes in the Middle East by re-establishing the Caliphate that united the Muslim world until European colonialism undermined that system of governance.

Although legitimate in Egypt all three men may have fallen into a trap of doing nothing wrong other than having been identified by security services operatives in London (including allegations of informants for foreign agencies).  

Londonistan as the capital had come to be known by many foreign security services by the end of 1999, had attracted radical preachers like Abu Qatada and Abu Hamza, all of whom were calling for the violent overthrow of Middle Eastern regimes.

Maajid Nawaz was one such student at London University’s School of Oriental and African Studies.   Studying Law and Arabic he was due to spend a year abroad to further his understanding of the language.  

It was a similar desire to improve their understanding of Arabic and Middle Eastern culture that took Nisbett and Pankhurst with their families to Egypt.

When he arrived in Egypt, it is quite possible that Nawaz’s name was already on a list of people being targeted by security services.   Neither he nor his two colleagues realised that their associations in Cairo might be placing them in danger.  For them it was simply a matter of exchanging radical ideas. 

For the state that jailed them, they had become part of the invisible enemy that had declared war on the West and posed a security threat in Egypt itself.

Once they had been arrested, it became clear during interrogations that the Londoners were being rounded up with hundreds of others because of their potential danger rather than anything they had actually done.    It’s alleged that anyone who’d had the slightest contact with Nawaz was arrested.   Nisbett told me that they were psychologically and physically tortured and in Reza Pankhurst’s case electrocuted.

After they were convicted of being a threat to the Egyptian state by a state security court (although it was never made clear what this threat amounted to) the wives of the men and their families tentatively began a campaign to get them released.   They kept the profile of the men up in the media whilst Fair Trials Abroad worked behind the scenes to ensure that the condition of the men could be monitored.

In far flung places the consular officials may be well meaning but they are often inexperienced.   Over the past decade FTA has helped the Foreign Office recognise the importance of ensuring that British citizens who face court proceedings or jail in a foreign country get regular visits to monitor progress.

Getting caught up in the war against terror is unusual; more common in Jakobi’s experience is those caught up in the war against drugs.   The numbers of lorry drivers imprisoned in European jails is testimony to this. 

Lorry drivers are a bit like captains of merchant ships and pilots of international freight carriers.  They transport goods around the world that others have bought and sold.  The big difference is that lorry drivers are lone individuals who pass through numerous territories.   This has in practice meant that drivers have more chance of ending up in jail if a dodgy drugs load is found on their vehicle.

This is precisely what happened to 61-year-old James Sheridan.   He’d picked up a multiple load in Spain and was due to drop it off at a distribution point in Basildon, Essex.   He never made it because French police stopped him on route and found cannabis concealed in a consignment of ornamental stones.   He spent four months in prison before being acquitted. 

Jakobi says his case is typical.  Firstly the investigation in France did not take in the full picture of the original transaction.  No evidence about who bought and sold the original consignment was made available to the court in Lyon. 

The other point worth making is that under internationally recognised agreements merchant sea captains and international freight pilots are not prosecuted in these circumstances whereas lorry drivers are.   Imagine the impact on international trade if they were.

Jakobi maintains its not just developing world regimes but European Union countries where miscarriages are commonplace.   One key point which hinders the innocent, he says, is that prosecutors in Europe have more clout in the information stakes than defence lawyers.  This he believes makes British citizens vulnerable to miscarriages of justice abroad in Europe and beyond.

Jakobi’s often been criticised for being a busybody and a bit of a neo-colonial type that should stop going around the world foisting British interpretations of human rights on others.  His defence has always been that he’s not arguing from a standpoint of British or European Law but international law.

Now he has decided to retire from FTA he says more support needs to be given to those who are innocent but return from abroad after a period of imprisonment.   Readjustment can be difficult and the genuinely innocent can end up losing everything. Jakobi believes the mission he started out of a sense of outrage is needed now more than ever as Britons travel to more far flung places.

As a parting shot I ask him where he thinks the safest place is to fall foul of the law?   His reply is as swift and unequivocal as it is depressing.   Stay at home.