Women stage global fast to pressure UK over Nazanin Zagari-Ratcliffe
Women around the world will take turns to fast for 24 hours in an attempt to put pressure on the UK government to secure the freedom of Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe from detention in Iran.
The campaign by FiLiA, a femaleled volunteer organisation working for the liberation of women, follows the 21day hunger strike Nazanin’s husband, Richard Ratcliffe, mounted outside the Foreign Office in London until midNovember.
Photographs of all the participants in the fasting relay, which begins on Monday, will be published on the group’s website day by day in a display of solidarity.
Lisa-Marie Taylor, the chief executive of FiLiA, said women from the UK, India, Morocco and Iran had already signed up to take part in the fasting relay.
“Richard has made it clear he doesn’t want people to get poorly,” she said. “So we thought we’d organise a chain of women to each fast for a day to keep the pressure on the government and show Nazanin how much support she has from women in the UK and globally.” The action was also inspired by the 89-year-old human rights lawyer Margaret
Owen, who went on a six-day hunger strike last month to take up the baton from Ratcliffe after he ended his protest, amid concerns about his health, Taylor added.
Owen, who visited Ratcliffe four times during his hunger strike, said: “Each time I sat next to him, I was so impressed but also so worried by the third week with the state of his health. We knew that Nazanin was begging him to stop. So I told him, I’m going to hunger strike for you.”
Although Ratcliffe was worried for her welfare, Owen said she was unconcerned, having previously gone on hunger strike for eight days in 2013 on behalf of the last British prisoner from Guantánamo Bay, Shaker Aamer.
“I probably survive a six-day hunger strike much better than much younger people because people my age don’t eat much anyway,” the barrister said, adding she passed the time doing Zoom meetings, listening to music and reading at her home in Hammersmith, west London.
Owen then recruited friends and human rights colleagues to go on hunger strike to support the Free Na
zanin campaign.
Ratcliffe, who said he lost 12kg on his hunger strike and subsequently underwent 10 days of medical checks in hospital, said he was humbled by Owen’s altruism. “The resonance that her hunger strike had in Iran was huge,” he said. “In that here is someone with the wisdom and the judgment of nine decades, deciding to make a stand. It was covered on Iranian satellite TV and a number of Iranian media in the diaspora. Nazanin was really touched.”
Zaghari-Ratcliffe went on hunger strike for 15 days in June 2019. Her husband’s strike this autumn – his second on her behalf – was prompted by fears she was about to be returned to a prison in Tehran for another year.
The aid worker, who has already spent five years imprisoned in Iran on spying charges she has always denied, recently lost her appeal against new propaganda charges brought against her by the Iranian regime and is living at her parents’ home in Tehran.
Participants in FiLiA’s campaign will be asked to email their MP with two demands. First, for Boris Johnson to fulfil his promise that Britain would repay the £400m it owed Iran for an unfulfilled 1970s arms deal, which is a seen a precondition for the release of ZaghariRatcliffe and other detainees. Second, for a judicial review to be launched to investigate why the debt has not been paid.
“There is something humbling about realising people who you didn’t know about are doing this act of solidarity,” Ratcliffe said of the campaign. “That no one’s letting us be forgotten.”
Ratcliffe said he hoped the fasting campaign would also provide strength and comfort to his seven-year-old daughter, Gabriella, who was upset that his strike had not entirely achieved its aim.
He said: “She certainly has been asking why it didn’t work: ‘You told me you were going on hunger strike to get Boris Johnson to get mummy back and mummy’s not back yet.’ And we’re preparing for Christmas without mummy again.”