The British foreign secretary on Sunday said Iran’s repeated sentencing of British-Iranian charity worker Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe amounts to torture, Anadolu Agency reported.
Speaking to the BBC’s Andrew Marr Show, Dominic Raab accused Tehran of using her as leverage to gain concessions from the UK, and that Iran has an obligation to release her immediately without any conditions.
“Nazanin is held unlawfully, in my view, as a matter of international law. I think she’s being treated in the most abusive, tortuous way. I think it amounts to torture the way she’s being treated,” he said.
“It is clear that she is subjected to a cat-and-mouse game that the Iranians, or certainly part of the Iranian system, engage with and they try and use her for leverage on the UK.”
Tehran is accused of using the aid worker as a bargaining chip in a dispute with London over unpaid debt as well as talks over the 2015 nuclear deal between Iran and world powers.
Nazanin was arrested in 2016, accused of spying for Western powers and spreading propaganda against the regime, charges she continues to deny.
The British-Iranian charity worker completed her five-year sentence in March 2021 when she was released and placed under house arrest. On April 26, however, Iran sentenced her to a further one-year jail term, accusing her of spreading propaganda against the regime.
Supporters hold a collection of letters and posters calling for the release of jailed UK-Iranian woman Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe before delivering them to the Iranian Embassy on February 21, 2018 in London, England [Leon Neal/Getty Images]
“This has weight in international law. All states, including Iran, have an obligation to prohibit torture. You can’t un-torture Nazanin but the government can make sure this is not happening to others,” he told the BBC.
According to a Sky News report, Iranian state TV claimed that the British government has agreed to pay $552 million to free Nazanin.”The release of Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe in exchange for the UK’s payment of its $552m debt to Iran has also been finalized,” an unnamed official said.
It also claimed that Tehran signed a deal with Washington on a prisoner swap in exchange for the release of $7 billion in frozen Iranian assets and funds.
Iran, US agree to prisoner swap and release of frozen funds – pro-Iranian Lebanese TV