Jemima Goldsmith on Monday questioned the “long silence” of the British government on Pakistan’s former prime minister and her ex-husband Imran Khan’s “brutal penalisation” by his political opponents and Chief of Defence Forces Field Marshal Asim Munir.Khan, 73, was arrested on August 5, 2023, in a corruption case and has remained in custody since then. He has been lodged in Adiala Jail, a detention facility on the outskirts of Rawalpindi.“Prime Minister @andyburnham and Foreign Secretary @Ed_Miliband: how much longer will Britain remain silent?” Goldsmith said in a post on X.“For three years, the father of my two sons, and Pakistan’s former Prime Minister Imran Khan, has been brutally penalised by his political opponents, in a personal vendetta by Army Chief Asim Munir, which according to the UN, amounts to torture and which is now taking a potentially fatal toll on his physical and mental health,” she wrote.Last week, the Pakistan Tehreek-i-Insaf founder was shifted from jail to the state-run Pakistan Institute of Medical Sciences (Pims), Islamabad, instead of the private Shifa International Hospital.The apex court had directed the government to move Khan to Shifa International Hospital for his thorough checkup and directed that he might stay in the health facility till Sept 16, 2026. His party has filed a contempt of court petition in the Supreme Court against Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif and six others for violating its order. The petition has yet to be taken up by the apex court.“He (Imran) has endured 3 years of solitary confinement. For nearly ten months now his family has been denied contact with him. He has been deprived of the most basic human contact, denied access to books, lawyers and doctors,” Goldsmith said.She lambasted that the international human rights standards are unequivocal. Under the UN’s Nelson Mandela Rules, solitary confinement lasting more than 15 consecutive days is prohibited and amounts to torture, she added.“He has endured this treatment not for 15 days, but for three years. Pakistan’s own Supreme Court has now intervened: ordering comprehensive medical treatment, access to his personal doctor, regular family visits and twice-weekly calls with his sons. Yet those orders are being defied,” she said, adding that this is no longer simply a Pakistani political matter—it is a human-rights emergency.She further said Khan has “deep and lifelong ties to Britain”. He studied at Oxford University, captained Oxford University cricket and spent years playing county cricket in England. His relationship with this country stretches back more than half a century and his charitable activities were internationally recognised, and include building the only free cancer hospital in Pakistan as well as a university, she said.“His sons, my two boys—Sulaiman and Kasim—are British citizens. They have been forced to watch their father’s health decline from thousands of miles away, prevented from visiting him, denied visas, publicly threatened by government officials with arrest themselves, and even denied court-mandated regular phone calls,” she said and appealed to the UK government to intervene.”Purported attempts at back-channelling have evidently failed. The previous Foreign Secretary @DavidLammy informed me in writing that Britain would not intervene if my sons, British citizens, are arrested when they travel to Pakistan to visit their father.“@FCDOGovUK: Britain must now speak out publicly and unequivocally. Demand that Pakistan comply with its own Supreme Court; restore Imran Khan’s medical access, his right to see his family, end his prolonged isolation and uphold his fundamental human rights,” she said.Goldsmith said Pakistan is a Commonwealth country. Britain has a long and proud tradition of standing against arbitrary detention, inhumane treatment and denial of fundamental rights. “Those principles mean very little if we invoke them only selectively and neglect them when inconvenient. This is an appeal to the new Burnham government to please now do the right thing,” Khan’s ex-wife said.