Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe

Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe (Zaghari; ; born 26 December 1978) is an Iranian-British dual citizen who was detained in Iran from 3 April 2016 as part of a long running dispute between Britain and Iran.

Zaghari-Ratcliffe has always denied the spying charges against her, and her husband maintains that his wife "was imprisoned as leverage for a debt owed by the UK over its failure to deliver tanks to Iran in 1979."

On 7 March 2021, her original sentence ended, but she was scheduled to face a second set of charges on 14 March.

On 26 April, she was found guilty of propaganda activities against the government and sentenced to another year in prison.

She appealed but on 16 October 2021, her appeal was rejected by the Iranian court.

Zaghari-Ratcliffe was finally released on 16 March 2022 immediately after Britain repaid the outstanding debt of £393.8 million to Iran.

She returned to the United Kingdom the next day.

Nazanin Zaghari was born and brought up in Tehran and studied English literature at the University of Tehran, before becoming an English teacher.

Following the 2003 Bam earthquake she worked as a translator in the relief effort for the Japan International Cooperation Agency.

She later worked for the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies and then moved to the World Health Organization as a communications officer.

In 2007, Zaghari-Ratcliffe moved to the UK after receiving a scholarship to study for a Masters in Communication Management at London Metropolitan University.

Shortly after her arrival in the UK she met her future husband, Richard Ratcliffe, through mutual friends.

The couple married in August 2009 in Winchester and their daughter was born in June 2014.

Zaghari-Ratcliffe worked for the BBC World Service Trust from February 2009 to October 2010, then worked at the Thomson Reuters Foundation as a project coordinator before taking on the role of a project manager.

Zaghari-Ratcliffe had worked for the BBC World Service Trust (now called BBC Media Action) between February 2009 and October 2010.

This is an international charity that provided training courses to Iranian citizen journalists and bloggers in its Iran Media Development Project's ZigZag magazine and associated radio programme.

Zaghari-Ratcliffe became a British citizen in 2013.

Zaghari-Ratcliffe used to return to Iran from time to time enabling her parents to see her daughter.

When travelling to Iran she would always do so on her Iranian passport, as required by Iranian law.

Zaghari-Ratcliffe used her British passport for all other international travel.

Iranian fundamentalists seemed to believe the BBC was a tool for British espionage and in 2014, several graduates were convicted and sentenced by Iran to up to 11 years in jail for their participation in these courses.

BBC Media Action described her role there as "junior and purely administrative".

By the time of her arrest, Zaghari-Ratcliffe was working for the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

CEO of the Thomson Reuters Foundation, Monique Villa, said “Nazanin has been working at the Thomson Reuters Foundation for the past four years as a project coordinator in charge of grants applications and training, and had no dealing with Iran in her professional capacity.”

In early September 2016, she was sentenced to five years in prison after being found guilty of plotting to topple the Iranian government.

While in prison, she went on at least three hunger strikes trying to persuade Iranian authorities to provide medical treatment for her health problems.

On 17 March 2016, Zaghari-Ratcliffe travelled to visit her family for Nowruz (Iranian New Year) with her 22-month-old daughter.

On 3 April 2016, members of Iran's Revolutionary Guard arrested her at the Imam Khomeini Airport as she and her daughter were about to board a flight back to the UK. Her daughter's British passport was confiscated during the arrest, but later returned, and she remained in Iran under the care of her maternal grandparents so she could visit her mother.

The reason for her arrest was unclear.

In early September 2016, Zaghari-Ratcliffe was sentenced to five years in prison for allegedly plotting to overthrow the Iranian government.

In October 2017, the prosecutor general of Tehran made a new claim that Zaghari-Ratcliffe was being held for running "a BBC Persian online journalism course which was aimed at recruiting and training people to spread propaganda against Iran".

The prosecutor general of Tehran stated in October 2017 that she was imprisoned for running "...a BBC Persian online journalism course which was aimed at recruiting and training people to spread propaganda against Iran".

On 23 August 2018, Zaghari-Ratcliffe was released on temporary licence for three days, which is standard practice prior to lengthier releases.

However, Zaghari-Ratcliffe suffered from panic attacks after returning to prison, and regretted having been given the temporary release.

Her husband said the temporary licence was a "cruel game" subject to conditions including the monitoring of her movements.

In late September 2018, when questioned about the Zaghari-Ratcliffe case, Iranian President Hassan Rouhani acknowledged awareness of the case (though denying knowledge of its specifics), and noted that "new charges [had been] brought against her."

Rouhani compared the imprisonment of foreigners in Iran to the imprisonment of Iranians in Western countries, saying that leaders on both sides were denying power over the decisions of their own judiciary, and that "we must all" exert "a constant, concerted effort... so... all prisoners must be free... but it must be a path that travels both ways."

In March 2019, the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) granted Zaghari-Ratcliffe diplomatic protection, raising the status of her case from a consular matter to a dispute between the two governments.

Iran argues the designation is contrary to international law, the Master Nationality Rule, with Iran's ambassador in London stating "Governments may only exercise such protection for own nationals, ... Iran does not recognise dual nationality".

She was temporarily released on 17 March 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic in Iran, but subject to electronic monitoring.