British Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson has been urged to retract comments he made regarding a British-Iranian woman serving a five-year jail term in Iran over fears he may have complicated her legal defense.
Speaking to the British Parliament’s Foreign Affairs Select Committee on November 1, Britain’s top diplomat said that Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe had been teaching journalism when she was detained in Tehran in 2016.
“When you look at what Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe was doing, she was simply teaching people journalism as I understand it,” said Johnson, who added that he found the situation “deeply depressing.”
Zaghari-Ratcliffe, who is being held on allegations relating to espionage, has persistently maintained that she was in Tehran to visit family and was not working in the country at the time of her arrest.
The head of a media foundation which employed Zaghari-Ratcliffe has appealed to the British Foreign Secretary to correct the comment. “I once again urge Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson to immediately correct the serious mistake he made,” Thomson Reuters Foundation CEO Monique Villa said in a statement.
“On 1 November he said that Nazanin ‘was training journalists’ in Iran. I have immediately clarified that this is not right as she is not a journalist and has never trained journalists at the Thomson Reuters Foundation where she is project manager in my Media Development team.”
The statement from the Foundation noted that Zaghari-Ratcliffe was brought back to court on November 4, several days after Johnson’s remarks, and “accused of ‘spreading propaganda against the regime.’ This accusation… can only worsen her sentence.”
An earlier statement from Villa “welcomed” Johnson’s “condemnation of Nazanin’s treatment,” but implored him to correct the perception that Zaghari-Ratcliffe was working in Iran.
2016 arrest
In April 2016, Zaghari-Ratcliffe was detained at the airport in Tehran on her way back to the UK from visiting family with her then 22-month-old daughter.
The Iranian government accused her of working for a UK media network involved in activities against Iran. She was sentenced to five years in jail and her child was placed in the care of her parents.
Last month, Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) opened a new case against her, accusing her of having joined organizations specifically working to overthrow the regime. She was also charged with having attended a demonstration outside the Iranian Embassy in London.
The charges were published by the London-based Thomson Reuters Foundation, the charitable arm of the news service, where Zaghari-Ratcliffe had worked as a project manager.
At the time Villa described them as “a complete invention” and said she viewed Zaghari-Ratcliffe’s treatment as a form of torture.
“The Thomson Reuters Foundation doesn’t work in Iran and has no program or dealings with Iran,” Villa said.
“We are all shocked by this new development and ask the Iranian government to put an end to her torture and the British government to finally intervene to end the ordeal of this British national.”
In September, Iranian President Hassan Rouhani told CNN’s Christiane Amanpour that his hands were tied on the issue of dual nationals imprisoned in his country.
In October, when the new charges were filed, the imprisoned women’s husband, Richard Ratcliffe, said the British government should be doing more to help, and that it should not be making business deals with the regime that has imprisoned his wife.
He also said that he believes the case against his wife is politically motivated, and could be a show of strength by the IRGC.
“It’s hard to have a clear sense of what’s going on. Different people are pushing in different directions and what we’re seeing is a shadow play.”