Nazanin’s jail term ends but family holds little hope
Husband says he will not prepare for a ‘homecoming that doesn’t happen’ as battle with Iran continues
NAZANIN ZAGHARI-RATCLIFFE and her family have refused to make preparations for her return from Iran because they fear authorities will not honour their obligation to release her when her prison sentence ends today.
Mrs Zaghari-Ratcliffe, 42, was arrested while on holiday with her daughter in Iran in 2016 and jailed on charges of undermining the regime. She has always denied the charges.
She has been under house arrest at her parents’ home in Tehran since prisons were emptied last year because of the pandemic.
Her five-year sentence ends today, but Richard Ratcliffe, her husband, said there was no sign that the regime actually planned to let her go until it received payment for decades-old debt it is owed by the British Government.
“She won’t have packed a bag, because it’s the unpacking that’s the hard bit. Emotionally, I’m not ready to tidy the flat. It can make me sad to prepare for a homecoming that doesn’t happen. It reminds me of that time they didn’t come back. I’d bought all this nice food for them. Then it just rotted. I didn’t want that to happen again.
“It was always outrageous that Nazanin was being imprisoned, whether it was right at the beginning or months and then years in.
“But throughout it all I’ve always thought the worst-case scenario would be waiting till the end of her sentence. It never occurred to me we’d go past the end of her sentence.
“For it to seem like it could just drift past it is really unsettling. It leaves us all asking, when will this end? What’s going on here?”
Mrs Zaghari-Ratcliffe, who worked as a project manager for the Thomson Reuters Foundation, has not seen her husband since she and their daughter, Gabriella, left their home in north London for a two-week holiday in Tehran in 2016. She was arrested at the airport as she waited to fly home.
Gabriella lived with her grandparents in the Iranian capital until she returned to live with her father in 2019.
Mrs Zaghari-Ratcliffe is one of several British-Iranian dual nationals who are being held, their families believe, on spurious charges to extract diplomatic concessions from the UK Government.
Mr Ratcliffe says Iranian officials have made clear to his wife and her family that her case is linked to a debt of about £400million the UK owes to Iran for failing to deliver on a 1979 order for Chieftain tanks and armoured vehicles.
He fears that Iranian authorities have prepared excuses to keep her in custody until the money is paid, including by opening a new case based on old evidence last November. The next hearing in the dispute over the debt will take place in a London court in April.
British officials have been reluctant to acknowledge a link between the two cases. But Mr Ratclffe said diplomats have told him they are optimistic that Mrs Zaghari-Ratcliffe could be brought home soon, suggesting some kind of deal may be in the offing.
He said he used a meeting with Dominic Raab, the Foreign Secretary, last week to push him to both pay the debt and impose a cost on Iran to make it regret taking hostages. especially if his wife is not released today.
“He didn’t disagree when I said she’s a hostage being held as leverage,” he said. “But there’s more of a gap in our points of view when it comes to what to do about it.
“Her imprisonment was always arbitrary, but there’s a legal fig leaf that disappears today and makes it illegal under Iranian law, which needs to be marked clearly. The Government needs to be clear it’s an effing outrage.”