British Nationals Murdered Abroad: Support for Families

Debate between Joshua Reynolds and Jim Shannon

Monday 12th May 2025 Commons Chamber

[Mr Joshua Reynolds (Maidenhead) (LD)]

I am glad to be able to speak in the Adjournment today about an issue of painful neglect that affects 80 British families each year, yet remains largely hidden from public and parliamentary view. We have all said goodbye to a loved one at an airport, wishing them well for their holiday, or their time abroad for work or study. If any of us was to receive a phone call saying that our loved one had been murdered when they were in the UK, that phone call would be devastating enough, but to receive that phone call when a loved one is thousands of miles away—murdered across an ocean, in a country that speaks another language—is a whole different world of pain and confusion.

Every year, British citizens are killed in acts of violence abroad. In many cases, their families are left to deal with unimaginable grief for the loss of a loved one, all while faced with the full weight of an unfamiliar, bureaucratic and different system. They do that alone. They have to navigate foreign legal procedures, untranslated documents and distant court proceedings with patchy, inconsistent support from their Government—all at a time of trauma, vulnerability and mourning.

Tonight, I want to be a voice for those families, through the Murdered Abroad campaign, a group of bereaved relatives who have turned their grief into a powerful call for change. They are not asking for special treatment—in fact, they want the complete opposite. They are asking for fairness and compassion, and the kind of structured, statutory support that families receive when tragedy strikes on British soil.

In January this year, I met a family in Maidenhead, who discussed their story of their son’s murder in America in 2009. They managed to contact the consulate, but the time difference was tricky, and there was not much help for the family with communicating. After many calls, they realised they were not really getting anywhere, so they had to take matters into their own hands, even going so far as to arrange the repatriation of their son’s body in the absence of support from their Government.

When a British citizen is murdered abroad, their family is plunged not only into grief and shock, but into a crisis made worse by the overwhelming burden of having to navigate unfamiliar systems with a lack of support.

[Jim Shannon (Strangford) (DUP)]

I commend the hon. Gentleman for securing this debate on a subject that is very important to many. Between 2010 and 2015, more than 250 British nationals were murdered abroad, in Pakistan, Tunisia, France and the United States, which he mentioned. We often see horror stories online—cases in which an individual has been found but not yet identified. Does he agree that, in the case of British nationals, there is more that the Foreign Office could do to ensure that all efforts are made to alert the family before any news is released to the media? Sometimes the media need to be sensitive.