The National - News

UK should hit Iran’s judiciary with sanctions, MPs told

- PAUL PEACHEY London

A new UK law aimed at human rights abusers should sanction Iranian security forces, judges and diplomats involved in hostage taking, British MPs were told.

Anti-torture charity Redress said the UK should use new powers to limit travel and freeze assets of officials involved in detaining dual citizens and using them as bargaining chips.

“The clear purpose of Iran’s unlawful detention of British and dual nationals has been to exert diplomatic leverage over the UK,” said Charlie Loudon, the group’s internatio­nal legal adviser. “It is essentiall­y a practice of hostage taking.”

He told the parliament­ary Foreign Affairs committee that sanctions could be used against security forces, prison officers, judges and diplomats “who effectivel­y market the detainees in return for diplomatic advantage”.

He said the tactic had been effective in the case of US pastor Andrew Brunson, who spent two years in a Turkish jail. He was released two months after the US froze the assets of two Turkish ministers.

UK Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab said last week that the UK would focus on 49 people from Russia, Saudi Arabia, Myanmar and North Korea.

Families of detainees in Iran in December backed the use of the measure, saying the failure of the UN and government­s to punish Iran for illegal detentions had emboldened the regime to keep using the tactic.

“There should be a clear cost for hostage taking,” Richard Ratcliffe, the husband of jailed charity administra­tor Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, said last year. “It should be anathema in the modern world.”

But another expert told MPs that attempts to sanction Iranian officials would be ineffectiv­e using the new law.

Sanctions “will be resented in a country that is constantly criticised and that has a history of sanctions”, said Anicee van Engeland, a senior lecturer in internatio­nal security at Cranfield University. “The population jokes about sanctions and wonder when the US will sanction air and water.”

Newspapers in English

Newspapers from United Arab Emirates