THE CASE OF NAZANIN ZAGHARI-RATCLIFFE

Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe is a British-Iranian citizen who was imprisoned in Iran in April 2016 on charges of espionage. Her case recently returned to the headlines after she was finally released from house arrest in early March. This was welcoming news to her husband and daughter, based in London, who have fought a brave and high-profile campaign for her release. Unfortunately, this did not signal the end of Zaghari-Ratcliffe’s traumatising ordeal as she was called back to court on 14 March 2021 to face a second set of charges, this time for propaganda against Iran. 

Zaghari-Ratcliffe, a project manager at Thomson Reuters Foundation, was arrested five years ago at an airport in Tehran as she was boarding a plane home to the UK with her daughter after visiting her parents. Following her original arrest, she was not informed of what she was being convicted of and was put in solitary confinement for months with no access to a lawyer until three days before her trial. In 2017, UN rights experts urged Iran to immediately release her, stating that she had been arbitrarily deprived of her liberty and that her right to a fair trial before an independent and impartial tribunal had been violated. 

Zaghari-Ratcliffe’s husband believes that his wife is being used as a “bargaining chip” for a long-standing debt that Britain owes Iran for a tank that was never paid for. If so, then this new charge could be designed to delay her release and exert yet more pressure on her family and the British government. Zaghari-Ratcliffe’s imprisonment comes in the context of other arrests of British-Iranian citizens, including Aras Amiri, Shahram Shirkhani, and Masud Mosaheb. According to The Guardian, there are 30 dual nationals—mostly European- and American-Iranian—in jail in Iran, and at least four are British-Iranian citizens. Iran does not recognise dual nationalities, claiming therefore that these are domestic issues and that it is entitled to deprive the detainees of consular assistance.

In a press release in March, British Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab called for Iran to permanently release Zaghari-Ratcliffe to the UK and called her continued confinement “unacceptable”. Boris Johnson echoed Raab’s sentiment, which sparked backlash due to comments he made in his role as Foreign Secretary in 2017 when he contradicted Zaghari-Ratcliffe’s claim that she was on holiday by implying that she had been training journalists when she was arrested. Campaigners on her behalf stated that she could face an increased prison sentence as a result. Since her detention, Zaghari-Ratcliffe’s physical and mental health has declined significantly—she has experienced depression and anxiety as a result of her imprisonment and separation from her daughter. Her house arrest has limited her access to any medical care.

THE GLOBAL PROBLEM OF HOSTAGE DIPLOMACY

As Xiyue Wang, a Chinese American historian who was jailed in Iran for three years and released as part of a prisoner swap, asserts “the real problem is that hostage-taking currently works”. Governments are increasingly addressing the issue—the US passed the Robert Levinson Hostage Recovery Act last June, which bolsters US government resources to bring back unlawfully detained Americans from abroad. It was named in honour of former FBI agent Robert Levinson, who was held hostage by the Iranian regime and is presumed to have died in custody in early 2020.

In February of this year, the Canadian government launched a global initiative on hostage diplomacy, which has been an important step in highlighting the problem. However, human rights lawyer Jared Genser says that Canada’s declaration is “…not a tool or an instrument that is going to change outcomes”. It possesses no coercive mechanisms, relying entirely on diplomacy of shame, which is unlikely to be effective in shifting the Iranian regime’s actions.

Time and time again human rights, liberty, and dignity are used as bargaining chips between powerful governments, and international law as it stands does not have adequate frameworks in place to prevent states from doing so. Opinion is divided about the best course of action with some, including ex-detainee and Washington Post reporter Jason Rezaian, saying that negotiations are necessary to justify the release of an innocent citizen. Others believe that negotiating is never legitimate because it would be seen as rewarding hostage-taking. The British government must de-incentivise Iran’s tactic of hostage diplomacy, or British and Iranian citizens will continue to pay the price. 

Iona works for a social justice organisation aimed at improving social mobility by teaching key employability skills in schools across London. Iona is an MSc graduate in Human Rights at the London School of Economics, where she focused her studies on postcolonial critiques of human rights, and the contention between citizenship law and human rights law.

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