Family of British aid worker hold Iranian embassy protest to demand her return
The husband of British aid worker Nazanin ZaghariRatcliffe held a demonstration outside the Iranian embassy in London yesterday to demand that she is allowed to return home after her five-year jail term ended.
Ms Zaghari-Ratcliffe, 42, was jailed after Tehran accused her of plotting to overthrow the regime.
She spent the past year under house arrest at her parents’ home in Tehran and her ankle tag was removed on Sunday when she completed her sentence.
The Iranian authorities continue to hold her passport and concerns are growing that she could be forced to remain in the country even longer after she was told to return to court next Sunday.
Her MP in the UK, Tulip Siddiq, said she feared that Ms Zaghari-Ratcliffe could be jailed for another five years.
Her husband, Richard Ratcliffe, was yesterday prevented from giving embassy officials a petition for her return signed by more than 160,000 people. Mr Ratcliffe and their daughter Gabriella, 6, joined Amnesty International UK officials at a protest outside the embassy.
“If you’d asked me when we first started campaigning with Amnesty to bring Nazanin home that five years later we’d still be knocking on the door of the Iranian embassy, still waiting for them to open it and explain what’s going on, then I would have been horrified,” Mr Ratcliffe said.
“It is such a gratuitous waste of human lives. Today it is hard to know just how much longer it will continue.”
He told the BBC that former prisoners warned him that at the end “it gets quite bumpy”, but it felt as though the saga was nearing a conclusion.
“Fingers crossed it is but also we might have many more months to go,” he said.
Ms Zaghari-Ratcliffe was detained in April 2016 after visiting her parents with her daughter and spent most of the next five years in Evin jail.
Campaigners said she was subjected to a grossly unfair trial, suffered health problems and spent months in solitary confinement.
Her family believes that she is being used as a pawn in a broader diplomatic game connected to a decades-old £400 million ($553m) debt owed by Britain after an arms deal was cancelled.
The British government called for her immediate return to the UK. Prime Minister Boris Johnson said her continued confinement was “totally unacceptable” and promised to work to secure her return.
Potential new charges date back to 2017, but amount to little more than a “rehash of old allegations”, her family said. They include attending a demonstration outside the embassy in London in 2009.
“Nazanin’s five-year jail sentence was a disgrace in the first place, but to apparently seek new means to hold her after the end of her sentence is cruelly rubbing salt into her wounds,” said Kate Allen, director of Amnesty International UK.
“The UK now needs to act. We’ve been worried for a long time that the UK government was dragging its heels over Nazanin and other British nationals held in Iran.”