{"id":1373,"date":"2018-12-28T17:20:00","date_gmt":"2018-12-28T17:20:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.iransos.com\/en\/?p=1373"},"modified":"2019-01-21T03:26:33","modified_gmt":"2019-01-21T03:26:33","slug":"iran-jailed-nazanin-zaghari-ratcliffe-for-diplomatic-leverage-says-hunt","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.iransos.com\/en\/?p=1373","title":{"rendered":"Iran jailed Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe for diplomatic leverage, says Hunt"},"content":{"rendered":"

Foreign secretary decries dual national\u2019s \u2018monstrous\u2019 1,000 days of imprisonment<\/span><\/strong><\/h3>\n
\"\"

Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe embraces her daughter Gabriella after her temporary release from prison in August. Photograph: AFP\/Getty Images<\/span><\/p><\/div>\n

Fr. 28 Dec. 2018 – Guardien – The foreign secretary, Jeremy Hunt, has accused Iran of using\u00a0Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, who has been imprisoned for 1,000 days, as a pawn for diplomatic leverage.<\/span><\/p>\n

Zaghari-Ratcliffe, a British-Iranian dual national from Hampstead, north London, has been held in Iran since April 2016. Tehran, which accused her of seeking to overthrow the government, has ignored repeated\u00a0calls from her family\u00a0and UK officials to release her.<\/span><\/p>\n

Speaking on BBC\u2019s Radio 4\u2019s Today programme on Friday, Hunt said: \u201cNazanin isn\u2019t the only person who is being detained, despite being totally innocent, as a pawn of diplomatic leverage.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cOn Boxing Day, Nazanin was 40 years old and she has been imprisoned for more than half of her four-year-old daughter\u2019s life. This is monstrous, it is totally unjust.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Zaghari-Ratcliffe was working for the Thomson Reuters Foundation when she was arrested at Imam Khomeini airport in Tehran in 2016 and later sentenced to five years in jail for spying, a charge she vehemently denies.<\/span><\/p>\n

In a video message released this week, Richard Ratcliffe, her husband, pointed out that 28 December would be his wife\u2019s 1,000th day in prison. He said she had\u00a0spent her 40th birthday, which fell on Boxing Day, in jail.<\/span><\/p>\n

Hunt added: \u201cIran is a country which has a great civilisation behind it. One of the oldest civilisations in the world. They want to be respected by other countries. This is not the way to do it \u2013 to imprison an innocent woman like this \u2013 and I really hope they will think again.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cWe have diplomatic differences with many countries across the world, but we don\u2019t have other countries who lock up innocent people as a tool of diplomatic leverage, and it has to stop.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

The Foreign Office was sharply criticised earlier this year by Daniela Tejada, whose husband, Matthew Hedges, was\u00a0detained for seven months\u00a0in the United Arab Emirates after he was accused of being a British spy.<\/span><\/p>\n

After accusing Hunt\u2019s department of putting relations with the Gulf state before her husband\u2019s freedom, he reached out to Tejada to reassure her.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cI spoke to her after she made those comments and I explained to her that I\u2019d actually raised the issue four times with the highest authorities in the UAE. And I think she heard that,\u201d Hunt told Today.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cI accept there was probably a misunderstanding in some of the communication that she had with some people in London. I think the key thing here is that Matthew Hedges was given a life sentence, we did everything we could to get him out and we succeeded.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Foreign secretary decries dual national\u2019s \u2018monstrous\u2019 1,000 days of imprisonment Fr. 28 Dec. 2018 – Guardien – The foreign secretary, Jeremy Hunt, has accused Iran of using\u00a0Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, who has<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[61],"tags":[263],"class_list":["post-1373","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news","tag-nazanin-zaghari-ratcliffe"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.iransos.com\/en\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1373","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.iransos.com\/en\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.iransos.com\/en\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.iransos.com\/en\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.iransos.com\/en\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1373"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.iransos.com\/en\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1373\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1409,"href":"https:\/\/www.iransos.com\/en\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1373\/revisions\/1409"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.iransos.com\/en\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1373"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.iransos.com\/en\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1373"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.iransos.com\/en\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1373"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}