UK calls treatment of British Iranians convicted in Iran “torture”

The treatment of Anglo-Iranians Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe in Iran, where she was recently sentenced to one more year in prison, this amounts to “torture”, said British Foreign Minister Dominic Raab on Sunday.

“I believe that the way she is treated amounts to torture and that the Iranians have a clear and unequivocal obligation to release her.”Raab told the BBC.

Prosecuted for “propaganda” against the Islamic Republic, Zaghari-Ratcliffe, 42, was sentenced on April 26 to one year in prison and one year without being able to leave the country, a month after serving a five-year prison sentence.

The British Chancellor felt that Tehran uses Zaghari-Ratcliffe to pressure London, as well as other citizens with dual nationality detained or in the hands of Iranian justice. “It is clear that she is subject to a game of cat and mouse in which the Iranians, if not part of the Iranian system, are involved and that they are trying to use it to influence the UK.”

Project manager of the Thomson Reuters Foundation (a subsidiary of the Anglo-Canadian news agency of the same name), she was arrested in April 2016 in Iran, where she had traveled to visit her family. Accused of trying to overthrow the Iranian regime, which she denies, she was sentenced to five years in prison and detained in Evin prison.

He finished serving his sentence under house arrest on March 7, but his passport was confiscated and he was prohibited from leaving the country.

This question is fueling tensions between London and Tehran. If London wants to solve it, according to Raab, the difficulty lies in the current context: presidential election in Iran and negotiations to save the agreement on the Iranian nuclear program.

London admits it owes Iran several hundred million pounds, but US sanctions appear to limit its ability to repay debt. “It’s not really what’s holding us back at the moment, but the larger context,” Raab said of the debt, highlighting the ongoing nuclear negotiations with Iran and its upcoming presidential elections.

In March, the legal campaign group Redress submitted a report to the British government which it said “confirms the seriousness of the ill-treatment suffered by Nazanin”. The organization claimed that it “considered Iran’s treatment of Nazanin to be torture.”

Iranian authorities have denied that Zaghari-Ratcliffe was mistreated.

(With information from AFP)

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