‘Jaballa Matar is fortunate to have a son as dedicated, and as highly respected in the West, as Hisham. Most of Libya’s political prisoners, including writers and journalists, are truly isolated from the world. I hope that the support for this campaign shows Libya that in order to improve their standing in the outside world they will also have to improve their relationship with their own people,’ – said Jonathan Heawood, right, Director of English PEN.

Held completely incommunicado, it was feared that Jaballa Matar was killed in a prison massacre in 1996. However, a Human Rights Watch Report released last month reported that Matar had been seen in a Tripoli High Security prison in 2002, giving free speech activists fresh hope that he may still be alive.

Jaballa is the father of the novelist Hisham Matar, whose book In The Country of Men was shortlisted for the Booker Prizer in 2006. Members of PEN, the international association of writers, including Booker Prize winners Salman Rushdie, Ian McEwan and Margaret Atwood, and Nobel laureates JM Coetzee, Wole Soyinka and Orhan Pamuk, have co-signed a letter to the Foreign Secretary, asking him to take up the case of Jaballa Matar with the Libyan government.

Booker Prize winner Ian McEwan, left, said:

‘Ten years ago Libya was a pariah among nations. Its rehabilitation into the international community has been spectacular. Last year it held the presidencies of the UN Security Council and the General Assembly. But this new respectability is hollow while Libya’s human rights record remains abysmal. The notorious Internal Security Agency is still a law unto itself. Jaballa Matar has been held without trial for twenty years. For a long time his family feared he was dead. Unknown hundreds share his situation.

The hope is that David Miliband and his colleagues in other foreign ministries will raise Matar’s case, and human rights generally, with Colonel Gaddafi’s government. There is some reason to think that it might be ready now to listen. Libya is a strange, proud and beautiful country – I spent the greater part of my childhood there. I would like the Foreign Secretary to make the case to the Colonel that these abuses of individual liberty, of due process and of freedom of expression and association diminish his country, however many presidencies it holds. For Jaballa Matar to be reunited with his family would be the true sign of Libya’s political maturity.’

Booker Prize shortlisted novelist Zadie Smith, left, said:

‘Hisham Matar is my friend and respected colleague, and he has suffered a great personal tragedy – but a tragedy that’s now also a public scandal. Britain’s eagerness to rehabilitate Gaddafi’s regime in order to further British business interests, particularly those of BP, must be qualified and subject to demands for Libya to improve the human rights of its citizens. Gordon Brown must ask for the immediate release of Libya’s “disappeared”, those held, like Hisham’s father, without trial and in secret.’

Find the Full Text of letter to Rt. Hon. David Miliband MP, Foreign Secretary by more than 200 authors here.