Britain’s Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson is facing growing criticism in the wake of a potentially catastrophic error which could lead to a British-Iranian woman having her jail sentence doubled.
Johnson has been urged to retract comments that appear to have complicated the fate of Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, who is currently serving a five-year prison term in Tehran after being accused of espionage — charges she denies.
Speaking to the British Parliament’s Foreign Affairs Select Committee last week, Johnson stated that Zaghari-Ratcliffe, who was detained at Tehran airport along with her young daughter in April 2016, had been teaching journalism during her visit.
Both Zaghari-Ratcliffe and her employer have always maintained she was simply visiting family while on vacation.
“When you look at what Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe was doing, she was simply teaching people journalism as I understand it,” Johnson said last week, adding that he found the situation “deeply depressing.”
The comments appeared to lead to Zaghari-Ratcliffe being summoned to an unscheduled court hearing over the weekend, at which Johnson’s remarks were cited as proof that she had engaged in “propaganda against the regime.” There are now fears that a further five year sentence could be imposed.
On Tuesday, a spokesman for Johnson confirmed that the minister had spoken with his Iranian counterpart.
Zaghari-Ratcliffe’s husband, Richard Ratcliffe, has urged Johnson to retract his comments.
“The worst thing the Foreign Secretary could do is to now suddenly go quiet and to create this problem without making any clarifications,” Ratcliffe told the UK Press Association.
“I think that’s really important. You can’t make a muddle and then leave it. That would be the worst of both worlds.”
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 the London-based media foundation which employed Zaghari-Ratcliffe has appealed to Johnson 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
Zaghari-Ratcliffe was detained at the airport in Tehran in April 2016 on her way back to the UK from visiting family with Gabriella, 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 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, husband Richard Ratcliffe said the British government should be doing more to help his wife, and that it should not be making business deals with the regime that has imprisoned her.
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.”
