UK – BBC, Mar. 13, 2026
A man has travelled to Washington to urge world leaders to help free his mother and her partner, who are imprisoned in Iran.
Lindsay and Craig Foreman, from East Sussex, were detained in January 2025 while travelling, and later sentenced to 10 years in prison in what their family called a “sham trial”.
Joe Bennett told a conference at the McCain Institute on Thursday that the international community must treat their case as “a problem for the Western civilisation and the globe”.
Speaking on Capitol Hill, he said: “There are days when you don’t want to show up, but you have to keep going. It’s heartbreaking that in this day and age this is still happening.”
Bennett, from Folkestone, Kent, previously told the BBC the couple’s situation had reached “a terrifying breaking point” following the outbreak of war between Iran and the US and Israel.
At the US-UK Transatlantic Conference on Hostage-Taking and Arbitrary Detention on Thursday, he criticised what he described as the UK government’s “non-existent” advocacy.
He said: “They do not want to be accountable for things that go wrong, they only want to be accountable for when thing goes right.
“I know that Keir Starmer will be on the tarmac when they come home if he’s still in power to shake their hand but he has never once said their name.”
Bennett said the family’s legal team had recently made a submission to the UN Special Rapporteurs to highlight the serious nature of their plight.
He says he hopes to “bring in the weight of international law to elevate the action that could be taken”.
