Revelations this week that Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe has been pressed to become a spy for Iran’s Revolutionary Guard takes the wheel full circle.
Arrested nearly three years ago and accused of being part of a secret plot to “topple” the state of Iran, it seems the Iranian authorities know a lot more about espionage than this 40-year-old charity worker and mother-of-one from north-west London.
Like numerous repressive governments the world over, Iran frequently accuses those it wishes to imprison of being spies.
Nazanin’s husband, Richard, an accountant thrust into the limelight after his wife was arrested during a family visit to Iran in 2016, has also been accused of being a British spy. Indeed, we at Amnesty were once roundly denounced by the Iranian leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini as “lackeys” of “satanic superpowers”, with pro-government Iranian newspapers flat-out calling us a “spy organisation”.
So, who are we to believe? A country with a record of suppressing free speech, locking up dissidents and human rights defenders, and carrying out hundreds of executions every year after deeply unfair trials? Or a married couple from Hampstead?
Away from the looking-glass world of Iranian state media and pronouncements from the hardline Revolutionary Guard, this all looks like one further act of cruelty against Nazanin. Genuinely recruit this person as a spy? After everything she’s gone through?
No, not only does Iran have a record of subterfuge and spurious allegations, it also goes after dual-nationals like Nazanin, often deploying an unpleasantly-wide repertoire of tactics.
This, then, is the context. Whether to pressure governments like the UK (or Canada, or the USA, or Sweden), or whether as part of internal disputes within Iran itself, many have suggested that Nazanin’s arrest was politically-motivated and that she is being used, as Jeremy Hunt suggests, as an unwitting “political pawn”.
A prisoner of conscience languishing in Tehran’s notorious Evin prison, with unmet health needs and a young daughter she is only allowed to see intermittently, Nazanin’s hunger strike is a desperate measure coming after grievous injustices. Solitary confinement, a string of official accusations made against her ahead of a – totally unfair – trial, the recurrent denial of medical treatment, the torment of being released for three days then immediately returned to jail – Nazanin has been subjected to a battery of abuses.
Throughout, the cruelty of the Iranian authorities towards its prisoners is plain for all to see. We’ve previously documented how the prison authorities in Iran will often deliberately deny medical care to prisoners held on politically-motivated charges. Ex-inmates interviewed by Amnesty have told us that even prison doctors are sometimes complicit in the abuse, cynically dismissing prisoners’ serious health problems as “figments of their own imagination” and fobbing them off with painkillers. We’ve described this as “toying with” the lives of detainees, and so it is.
That Nazanin and her fellow hunger striker – the distinguished human rights defender Narges Mohammadi – are resorting to this desperate, life-endangering measure simply to get vital medical care, is far from unusual in Iran. But it’s a disgrace, nonetheless.
Nazanin and Narges are prisoners of conscience – they should be free and enjoying life with their families, not suffering in Evin jail.
Nazanin’s tireless husband Richard is again meeting Jeremy Hunt today to press for more UK support for his wife. He should get it.
Amnesty’s campaign for Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe is here.