HUMAN rights are not “like Father Christmas’s presents,” the husband of long-jailed Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe warned as the furore over tweets by just-released British-Egyptian activist Alaa Abd El-Fattah continued.

Richard Ratcliffe, whose wife was imprisoned for six years in Iran, said he did not regret backing the campaign to free Mr Fattah, even though his social media posts from many years ago were “horrible and indefensible.”

But Mr Ratcliffe said human rights are “not like Father Christmas’s presents,” adding: “You don’t just get them if you are good.”

Mr Fattah was arrested in Egypt in 2019 and sentenced to five years in prison in 2021, on charges of spreading false news.

The same year, he was granted British citizenship by the Conservative government. He was pardoned by Egyptian dictator Abdel Fattah El-Sisi last week.

Since his tweets, apparently urging the killing of “zionists” and the police, have been unearthed, the Tories and Reform have been leading calls for his citizenship to be revoked and for his deportation.

Mr Fattah has since apologised for the comments, saying they were “mostly expressions of a young man’s anger and frustrations in a time of regional crises [the wars on Iraq, on Lebanon and Gaza], and the rise of police brutality against Egyptian youth.”

He said: “I particularly regret some that were written as part of online insult battles with the total disregard for how they read to other people. I should have known better.”

Responding via email to written questions from the Press Association, Mr Ratcliffe insisted human rights could not be selectively applied.

“I don’t regret campaigning for Alaa, nor does Nazanin, even if we were surprised by what has emerged. We have told his family this. Of course, I was shocked by some of his posts.

“Some things I have since seen look like they have been taken out of context, and some things just look horrible and indefensible, whatever the context was.”

“One of the things I think sometimes the human rights community gets wrong is that it tries to depict people as heroes and saints in order to be worthy of human rights.

“Most people held hostage, most people arbitrarily detained are not heroes, but ordinary people. We all have feet of clay.”

Commons foreign affairs committee chair Emily Thornberry asked: “If politicians start willy-nilly saying, ‘well, I don’t want you to be British anymore,’ I mean, where does it stop?”

Justice Minister Jake Richards told Times Radio: “It’s absolutely right that there are a lot of legal obstacles before a government can strip anyone of their citizenship or deport anyone.

“We don’t want to have a position where governments can simply take such action without some legal framework.”