Statement from REDRESS on the new charges against Nazanin

Statement from Rupert Skilbeck, Director of REDRESS, on the new charges presented against REDRESS’ client Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe:

“We are very concerned about the latest development in Nazanin’s case. To issue a new charge now against a mother who has spent the last two years unlawfully in prison is a terrible miscarriage of justice.

Time and time again UN experts have called for her release and ruled that her detention is arbitrary and that she has been denied her right to a fair trial.

Any new charges against Nazanin further worsen these ongoing violations of her human rights. REDRESS will continue to press the UK Government to do everything it can to protect Nazanin and bring her home.”

To request an interview or for more information, please contact Eva Sanchis, REDRESS’ Head of Communications, on +44 (0)20 7793 1777; (0)7857 110076 (out of hours) or [email protected].

Note to editors:

Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, a charity worker with the Thomson Reuters Foundation, has been arbitrarily detained in Iran since she was arrested on the 3 April 2016 while returning to the UK from visiting family in Iran with her baby daughter Gabriella.

She is serving a five-year jail sentence in Tehran’s notorious Evin Prison after being convicted in an unfair trial by a Revolutionary Court on unspecified charges relating to national security. Nazanin has suffered a serious decline in her physical and mental health since being jailed. She spent eight and a half months in solitary confinement, held in inhumane conditions, in cells without windows, natural air or light and measuring around 1.5m by 2m in size.

According to her husband, Richard Ratcliffe, Nazanin was taken to court on 19 May 2018 and told to expect another conviction for “spreading propaganda against the state”.

REDRESS has brought Nazanin’s case to the attention of the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture – stressing that the harsh treatment inflicted upon her may amount to torture – and the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention, which found in 2016 that her detention was arbitrary and that she had been targeted because she is a dual British-Iranian national.

More information about her case can be found here