LONDON – Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, a British-Iranian woman who has been detained in Tehran since 2016, had her house arrest orders suspended when her sentence ended on Sunday, but her return to London remained uncertain as she faced new charges.
In the past five years, the Zaghari-Ratcliffe case has deepened a diplomatic split between Britain and Iran and has attracted international condemnation. But what exactly is going to happen next is still unclear – a common situation for much of her time in custody, a period filled with high expectations and dashed hopes for her family and supporters.
Ms. Zaghari-Ratcliffe was convicted of conspiring to overthrow the Iranian government and has been detained at her parents’ home in Tehran since last year. On Sunday afternoon, his lawyer, Hojjat Kermani, told the Iranian state news agency IRNA that Zaghari-Ratcliffe had been released from house arrest, but ordered to appear in court next week on additional charges.
Her ankle monitor has been removed, but she is still without her passport. Her husband, Richard Ratcliffe, speaking on Sunday morning, said she was “definitely satisfied” for having removed the ankle mark.
He said the decision “was not exactly what we expected, but it makes sense”.
“This resolves the anomaly at the end of the sentence, but keeps it as a lever,” he said. “It seems to me a little more that the games continue.”
Ms. Zaghari-Ratcliffe, 43, denied the charges. Human rights groups, Western officials and the United Nations have said that her case is one of several cases in which Iran arbitrarily detained foreigners on unfounded charges, many of them with dual citizenship, such as Zaghari-Ratcliffe.
Human rights groups have accused Iran of trying to normalize what they call hostage diplomacy with the West, arresting people on counterfeit charges and using them as a political bargaining chip. Iran has denied these accusations and has argued that its dealings with Iranian citizens like Zaghari-Ratcliffe are an internal matter.
British Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab said on Sunday that while he welcomed the removal of Mrs Zaghari-Ratcliffe’s ankle tag, his “continued confinement is unacceptable”.
“She must be released permanently so that she can return to her family in the UK,” said Raab in a statement. “We will continue to do everything in our power to achieve this.”
Previous interactions with Iranian officials left Zaghari-Ratcliffe’s family preparing for the worst before Sunday’s deadline, including that the day could pass without his release. Mr Ratcliffe said that he feared that she “went beyond a point that was the obvious decision point, which made us wait for us to take her home”.
The ordeal began in April 2016, when Ms. Zaghari-Ratcliffe was stopped at Tehran airport after visiting a family in Iran with her daughter, Gabriella.
Ms. Zaghari-Ratcliffe, who worked as a project manager for the Thomson Reuters Foundation, was tried and ended up in the famous Evin Prison in Tehran, where she spent time in solitary confinement and struggled with her physical and mental health.
The British government granted her diplomatic protection in 2019 in an attempt to gain her freedom, and her transfer to house arrest last March, when the coronavirus pandemic swept Iran, raised hopes that she would have clemency and permission to return to Britain. -Brittany.
But in September, Iran filed new charges against her and scheduled a new trial, which ended up being stopped. The request for her to appear in the Tehran court this month is related to these charges, in which she is accused of spreading propaganda against the Iranian government, her lawyer said.
“It is, in my view, clearly a game of chess. She is the pawn, ”Ratcliffe said in an interview last week. “And it is not the beginning of that game.”
Her husband had expressed hope that she could be on a plane on Monday, but Sunday’s events made it unlikely.
“She had been counting down to that date for 18 months,” he said. “There is something deeply disturbing about exceeding that limit, because if that can happen, anything can.”
According to her husband, Iranian authorities told Ms. Zaghari-Ratcliffe that her detention would end when Britain settled a 400 million pound debt that had lasted four decades, now worth $ 550 million, related to a failed arms deal with the Shah of Iran before his fall in 1979.
Ms. Zaghari-Ratcliffe was arrested just before a debt battle started in a London court. Iran said that the debt was not a factor in his detention.
Ratcliffe criticized what he describes as a wait-and-see approach by British officials about his wife’s status, but said he was more hopeful after meeting Raab, the secretary of foreign affairs, last week.
A British Foreign Ministry spokesman said in a statement that Raab and the department remained “in close contact with Zaghari-Ratcliffe and his family and continue to provide our support”. He criticized his detention “as a diplomatic influence”.
“We continue to do everything we can to ensure the release of two arbitrarily detained British citizens so that they can meet with their loved ones,” the statement said.
Kate Allen, director of Amnesty International UK, called the events on Sunday “bittersweet” and urged the British Foreign Office to act.
“After all that Nazanin has been through, this seems yet another example of the calculated cruelty of the Iranian authorities,” Allen said in a statement, adding that the possibility of a new trial was designed to delay the release of Zaghari-Ratcliffe and put pressure on.
“This will not end until Nazanin has his passport and is on a flight home from the UK,” said Allen.
For now, Ms. Zaghari-Ratcliffe and her family are in a waiting pattern.
“It is a perpetual ambiguity,” said Ratcliffe, citing the constant questioning “maybe she is at home, maybe it gets worse, maybe it will stay the same.”