IRAN JAILS BRITISH-IRANIAN AID WORKER NAZANIN ZAGHARI FOR ONE YEAR

Mon 26 April 2021:

An Iranian court has sentenced the British-Iranian dual national Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe to a one-year jail term and banned her from leaving the country for a year after.

Nazanin is charge with “propaganda activities against the Islamic Republic”, according to her lawyer.

Lawyer Hojjat Kermani told a local newspaper that Zaghari had also been banned from leaving the country for one year.

“Nazanin Zaghari was sentenced to one year in prison and a one-year ban from leaving the country on charges of propaganda against the Islamic Republic,” he was quoted as saying.

Kermani said his client will appeal against the sentence.

Nazanin was first arrested in April 2016 at Tehran’s international airport after visiting her family in Iran. She was working for the Thomson Reuters Foundation at that time.

Following a legal trial, she was sent to Tehran’s Evin Prison, where she spent the next four years until her transfer to house arrest in March last year amidst COVID-19 outbreak in Iran.

In September last year, fresh charges were filed against her, calling for a new trial.

Last month, her house arrest orders were lifted, but the fresh charges still loomed, ruling out the possibility of her return to London and reunion with her family there.

This high-profile case has over the past five years led to a deep diplomatic standoff between London and Tehran and drawn widespread condemnation worldwide.

Iran, however, maintains that the due legal processes have been followed in her case.

Amnesty International UK’s director, Kate Allen, said Zagari-Ratcliffe had twice had to face a “sham trial” in Iran. “We fear that going back to jail will be almost too much for Nazanin to bear,” she said.

UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson, speaking to reporters on Monday, termed the sentence “wrong”.

“I don’t think it’s right at all that Nazanin should be sentenced to any more time in jail. I think that it was wrong,” he said.

The foreign secretary, Dominic Raab, said: “This is a totally inhumane and wholly unjustified decision. We continue to call on Iran to release Nazanin immediately so she can return to her family in the UK. We continue to do all we can to support her.”

The UK, France and Germany are in talks, being held in Vienna, alongside the US, Russia and China to negotiate a way for the US and Iran to return to full compliance with the nuclear deal signed by Iran in 2015.

The UK has been reluctant to raise human rights issues in the context of the Vienna talks, and instead treated them as self-standing negotiations.