In 2016 Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, a British-Iranian charity worker, was arrested in Iran and sentenced to five years in prison.
Zaghari-Ratcliffe had visited Tehran to see her parents with her daughter, Gabriella, and was subsequently arrested after the Iranian regime claimed that she had been working against the state and spying.
“In 2020, Zaghari-Ratcliffe was moved from prison due to Coronavirus”
The human rights charity Redress recently found Zaghari-Ratcliffe had post-traumatic stress disorder, depression and obsessive stress disorder due to “traumatising experiences in the prisons of Iran”. Zaghari-Ratcliffe also told doctors that, during solitary confinement at the beginning of her sentence, she was interrogated – often while blindfolded – for up to nine hours a day.
In 2020, Zaghari-Ratcliffe was moved from prison due to Coronavirus and held under house arrest in Tehran until March 2021, when her ankle tag was removed. But now, she has been sentenced to another year in jail and a year travel ban. She is being charged with “propaganda activities against the regime” after allegedly attending a protest outside the Iranian Embassy in 2008.
On 8th March, she should have been on the plane back to see her husband and daughter, after years of separation. But the fresh charges were brought forward, despite Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab’s pledges and promises that he had been speaking “particularly intensely with the Iranian foreign minister since the summer”.
According to Zaghari-Ratcliffe’s husband Richard Ratcliffe, she was “very angry at the unfairness of a second sentence” and wanted to know why Raab’s assurance that progress was being made “had not worked out.”’
At the moment she can appeal which will take a few weeks. However, the likelihood is the impending sentence which will take a further two years away from spending time with her now seven-year-old daughter, Gabriella.
Since her detainment in 2016, Richard Ratcliffe has been campaigning and having direct conversations with members of Parliament and the Prime Minister in order to bring her home.
The recent events are disgraceful for the British government, not only because of their failure to act, but also because it is alleged that the main reason Zaghari-Ratcliffe is being held in Iran is due to a historic debt Britain owes Iran after tanks were paid for in the 1970s but never received.
The two countries have been in deadlock about this debt ever since, with issues arising such as the interest owed on the money and who it should be paid to.
Labour MP Tulip Siddiq, who represents the family’s constituency, has been continually spotlighting Zaghari-Ratcliffe’s case in the House of Commons and most recently told fellow MPs “From where I’m standing, I’ve seen no evidence on the part of the Prime Minister so far. He still hasn’t got his government to pay the £400m debt that we as a country owe Iran.”
Her new sentence also comes at a time of high tensions over Iran’s nuclear programme, with the country abandoning all limits of its 2015 nuclear deal with world powers after the former US President Donald Trump’s 2018 decision to withdraw from the accord.
Currently, the UK, France and Germany are in talks being held in Vienna, alongside the US, Russia and China, to negotiate a way for the US and Iran to return to full compliance with the nuclear deal signed by Iran in 2015.
Richard Ratcliffe said it was not clear if the Americans and Europeans viewed the release of dual nationals as a hoped-for by-product of the Vienna talks or were instead prepared to make it an explicit demand. During this time, the West has been very wary of raising human rights issues.
Zaghari-Ratcliffe, alongside other dual nationals detained in Iran, has been used as a political leverage for the debt Britain owes Iran.
“It needs much more than sympathy to get her home.”
For years, Boris Johnson and Dominic Raab, in particular, have been making promises and saying the correct words to Zaghari-Ratcliffe’s distressed family who desperately want her to be returned home. Yet there has been no action, and events unfold which make that day of reunion even further from the Zaghari-Ratcliffe family’s reach.
Richard Ratcliffe told the BBC: “It needs much more than sympathy to get her home.”
The continual lack of action from the British government for five years is shameful and it is on their hands to prevent Zaghari-Ratcliffe from yet again being unlawfully and inhumanely detained.
Isabella Boneham
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Featured image courtesy of Steve Eason via Flickr.com. Image license can be found here. No changes have been made to this image.
Isabella Boneham
Graduated from University of Warwick with a history degree in 2020, aspiring journalist and have a strong interest in current affairs, politics and the environment.