Assurances by a UK minister {that a} British man imprisoned in India will obtain a good trial fly within the face of proof that he has been tortured and arbitrarily detained, three attorneys who held senior public roles have warned.

To coincide with the sixth anniversary of Jaghtar Singh Johal’s detention, Sir Ken MacDonald KC, Elish Angiolini KC and Jim Wallace KC have written to the UK Foreign Office minister, Lord Ahmad, asking him to retract his current feedback saying that the British citizen will obtain “due process” in India.

Lord MacDonald, a former director of public prosecutions for England and Wales, and Lady Angiolini and Lord Wallace, who had been lord advocate and advocate common respectively for Scotland, say “there can be no due process where proceedings have been tainted by torture”, or the place expenses are politically motivated and punish freedom of expression.

Johal, a Sikh activist and blogger from Dumbarton, Scotland, was in India in 2017 to get married when he was seized by plainclothes officers in entrance of his spouse, hooded, bundled right into a automotive and tortured, in line with the marketing campaign group Reprieve. It says the Indian authorities seem to have acted on a tip-off from UK intelligence.

The then prime minister, Boris Johnson, said the Indian government was arbitrarily detaining Johal – a place shared by the UN working group on arbitrary detention – however the authorities has been accused of since backsliding on its stance. In a debate about Johal’s case in the House of Lords in September, Ahmad stated the UK wouldn’t name for the discharge of a person or intervene out of the country’s authorized course of “where a due process is being followed”.

In their letter to Ahmad, MacDonald and Wallace write: “There is no possibility of due process in Jagtar’s case, which is based around a so-called confession obtained under days of brutal torture. The UK government has acknowledged Jagtar’s serious allegations of torture by state officials whilst in pre-trial detention, including electrocution, beatings, stress positions and threats to burn him alive. To bring an end to the torture, Jagtar was forced to sign blank pieces of paper, subsequently represented by the authorities as a ‘confession’. This is the primary basis for his continued detention.”

Johal faces terrorism expenses in reference to killings by the Khalistan Liberation Force (KLF), a banned terrorist organisation, of which he’s alleged to be a member. The friends’ letter says that within the six years he has been in jail no credible proof has been forthcoming and calls on Ahmad to retract his “unsustainable” feedback about due course of.

In September, Johal’s MP, Martin Docherty-Hughes, accused the UK prime minister, Rishi Sunak, of prioritising a commerce take care of India over his launch after a letter from Ahmad said the government would not call for his release, claiming that taking such a place wouldn’t be in his greatest pursuits.

Johal’s brother, Gurpreet, stated: “My brother’s trial is a sham and the prime minister and foreign secretary know it. They won’t do what it takes to bring him home, so they come up with excuses. It’s been six years of endless delays, and while prosecutors drag the process out without presenting any credible evidence, Jagtar is slowly dying in an Indian jail.”

A Foreign Commonwealth and Development Office spokesperson stated it was dedicated to resolving Johal’s case “as soon as possible”.

They added: “We continue to provide consular assistance to Mr Johal and his family and have consistently raised his case directly with the government of India.”