RYAN CORNELIUS, a British businessman, was arrested in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) in 2008 and handed a ten-year sentence for fraud. At the end of that sentence he was taken before a judge and given 20 more years. He was physically prevented from going to court to appeal. Last year a UN panel found that Mr Cornelius is being held illegally and called for his release and compensation.

Cue outrage from Britain? Hardly. Mr Cornelius’s own government has yet to call for his release. Only recently did it support his family’s plea for clemency. Last month a group of British MPs and peers wrote to the new foreign secretary, Lord (David) Cameron, urging a stronger response. Mr Cornelius has been “shockingly let down by your department at every point of his ordeal”, said the letter. “At every stage, [the Foreign Office] appears to have been guided by the notion that acquiescing in the cruel treatment of a British citizen was a necessary part of maintaining a close relationship with the UAE.”

Most stinging of all, the letter suggested that the government’s “weakness in the protection of British victims of human-rights abuse now looks systemic”. A UAE-focused “fact-finding” report released on December 4th by three parliamentary grandees—Baroness Helena Kennedy, Sir Robert Buckland and Alistair Carmichael—offers plenty of support for this dim view of British diplomacy.

The report highlights numerous other cases of Emirati legal medievalism and British weakness in response. One of the most striking is that of Matthew Hedges, an academic who was accused of spying, tortured and handed a life sentence. The British government reportedly urged Mr Hedges’ partner not to go public, and fought his case only after it caused a media storm. Following Mr Hedges’ release in 2018, and a subsequent, highly critical report from the parliamentary ombudsman, who noted that consular staff failed even to notice signs of torture, the British government offered him a formal apology and compensation (of just £1,500, or $1,900).

Privately, British officials talk of the need for a diplomatic balancing-act with the UAE, an autocratic state that is also an important trade, investment and intelligence partner. But Britain fails to bat for nationals wrongfully locked up in unfriendly countries, too.

In April the House of Commons foreign-affairs committee published a report outlining a litany of concerns over the government’s response in cases of hostage diplomacy, the most famous of which was Iran’s six-year-long detention of Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe. The British government has still not publicly called for China to release Jimmy Lai, a businessman and pro-democracy campaigner with dual British-Chinese nationality who was imprisoned almost three years ago after becoming ensnared by Hong Kong’s repressive national-security law.

The lawmakers’ reports suggest Britain fares badly in comparison with other democracies when it comes to protecting its own. America’s State Department, unlike the Foreign Office, has an envoy (with a staff of around 20) devoted to getting illegally detained citizens freed. Even small European countries with little diplomatic clout sometimes leave the British looking flat-footed. Martin Lonergan, a businessman with dual British-Irish citizenship held in the UAE in 2020, told the fact-finding panel that he got much more effective help from Irish officials than from their British counterparts.

The reports urge a much more robust, joined-up approach. Britain needs an American-style point person with a mandate to champion citizens wrongly held abroad. It should rethink its policy of “quiet diplomacy”, which is often an excuse for inaction. The presumption that it is the best approach is “false…other than in the initial phases”, says the foreign-affairs committee’s report, which concludes: “Silence abets state hostage-taking.”

Such changes are made more urgent by an increase in arbitrary detentions worldwide. Data are limited: some countries, including Britain, prefer not to reveal how many of their citizens are victims. Numbers from countries that do release them suggest a growing incidence, driven in part by rising geopolitical tensions. Between 2012 and 2022 an average of 11 Americans were wrongfully detained abroad each year, according to criteria set out in the Levinson Act, a hostage-recovery law, up from an average of four in 2001-11. This is, then, not a problem Britain can wish away. It is high time that, as one of its former diplomats puts it, the Foreign Office learned to overcome its “institutional pusillanimity”. ■