This Week in Human Rights News

Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe freed in Iran

Sources: Al Jazeera, BBC, The Guardian, Reuters

• Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe was freed today from her electronic monitoring bracelet after being moved from prison into house arrest in March 2020 due to Covid-19.

• The year Nazanin spent in house arrest completed her five-year sentence; of which she spent more than four years in prison, including nearly nine months in windowless solitary confinement in two separate prisons.

• Nazanin, a British-Iranian aid worker, was arrested in April 2016 with her young daughter at Tehran Airport and was convicted of plotting to overthrow the clerical establishment.

• Since her arrest, Nazanin has gone twice on hunger strike in protest of her conditions and has been denied consular access since Iran does not recognise her dual citizenship status.

• However, she may still face new charges and it is unclear whether she will be able to leave Iran, as she is still under a travel ban. 

• Nazanin’s lawyer, Hojjat Kermani, said that a court date was set on March 14 for her second case where is accused of propaganda against the Islamic Republic’s system for participating in a rally in front of the Iranian Embassy in London in 2009.

• Nazanin’s husband, Richard Ratcliffe is said to have had a mixed reaction to the news, as she still has to appear in front of a court in a few days.

• Despite welcoming the removal of her ankle tag, Dominic Raab, the British foreign minister said that Iran continued to put her and her family through a “cruel and an intolerable ordeal”.

• The decision on a possible second set of charges is thought to rest on the broader complicated state of UK-Iranian diplomatic relations.

• Nazanin and her husband have long contended she is being held as a bargaining chip to secure the release of more than £400m debt that the UK acknowledges it owes to Iran but says it cannot pay due to sanctions against Iran. 

• In a statement, the UK Foreign Ministry said that “We do not accept Iran detaining dual British nationals as diplomatic leverage. The regime must end its arbitrary detention of all dual British nationals.”