LONDON: The husband of jailed British-Iranian Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe has said she felt hopeless during an urgent parliamentary debate on her situation.
Zaghari-Ratcliffe watched the House of Commons proceedings from Iran, where she has been sentenced to another year in jail, but said there “wasn’t anything that gave grounds for hope,” according to husband Richard Ratcliffe.
He said she questioned why Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab skipped the parliamentary proceedings and sent Middle East and North Africa Minister James Cleverly instead.
Zaghari-Ratcliffe received her new jail sentence and a year-long ban on travel on Monday, on new charges of “spreading propaganda against the regime.”
She was detained on national security charges in 2016 and has served five years in prison since.
Ratcliffe told the Press Association: “She watched the urgent question on the (website) link. What she noticed was that Dominic Raab hadn’t come to answer for the government, a junior minister had been sent. It was like, ‘Listen, we’ve had seven of these — am I not worth the foreign secretary coming along to answer and explain the government’s policy’?”
Cleverly told MPs on Tuesday that Britain would not accept dual nationals being used as “diplomatic leverage.”
Tulip Siddiq, the MP for Zaghari-Ratcliffe’s constituency, told the debate: “At the heart of this tragic case is the prime minister’s dismal failure to release my constituent and to stand up for her.”
Cleverly responded that Siddiq’s “anger and frustration” are “misdirected because Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe and the other British dual nationals held in arbitrary detention are being held by Iran. It is on them (Tehran).”
