Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, unfairly detained for years by Iran, and her husband Richard have been abandoned by Boris Johnson – Laura Waddell

My heart breaks for Richard Ratcliffe and his wife Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe. While Iranian officials are in the UK for COP26, he has been on an increasingly worrying hunger strike (for the second time) to draw attention to her plight.

Richard Ratcliffe, husband of Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, a British-Iranian held in Iran since 2016, sits outside the Foreign Office with his daughter Gabriella last week as his hunger strike continues (Picture: Tolga Akmen/AFP via Getty Images)

Nazanin, a dual national citizen with a background in charity work and media, was arrested in Iran in 2016, while taking her one-year-old daughter to visit grandparents for the Iranian New Year.

The nebulous charges against her included “spreading propaganda against the system”. She has been detained unfairly ever since, her communication with the outside world limited, with additional jail time tacked on after the first sentence was completed.

Last year while awaiting the unexpected second trial, then torturously postponed, she revealed the toll it was taking: “I really can’t take it any more. They have all these games and I have no power in them. Sometimes I am just full of anger, ready to explode. I find myself hating everything in this life, including myself. There is no escape.”

Nazanin has missed the first five-and-a-half years of her young daughter’s life and does not know how or when she will be able to return. What she and her family are going through is unimaginable, life-destroying cruelty.

There is speculation Nazanin is really being held hostage to the diplomatic tension between the UK and Iran concerning debt of around £400 million owed to the latter. While supporters have spent these years campaigning for her release, Boris Johnson has both promised to help and subsequently failed to deliver.

But his most significant input was worse than inaction. In 2017, while Foreign Secretary, Johnson made an extremely careless remark in the Commons, stating erroneously that Nazanin was in Iran to train journalists.

Supporters hold a photo of Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe during a demonstration in January 2017 calling for Iran to release her (Picture: Chris J Ratcliffe/Getty Images)

This both contradicted and jeopardised her legal defence. Johnson rebuffed initial criticism over the incident, initially dodging blame for his words, but the gravity of the situation meant he was later forced into appearing in the Commons to make a full correction and apology. How depressing a man of such calibre would become our Prime Minister.

As time passes, Richard Ratcliffe now believes there is no real plan to save his wife. He told the BBC this week: “Nazanin is held over some debt that the British government owes the Iranians. She’s not going to come home until it gets paid.”

The UK government has left these citizens floundering in a state of unending desperation, Nazanin in her unfair detainment and Richard in his quest to save her.

As I write this, Ratcliffe is approaching 17 days without food, making this latest protest increasingly hazardous. If he goes much longer, he risks going into a coma. How much pain must he and his wife both be in, while unable to reach one another, for him to take such extreme measures as this?

Having spent over five years campaigning his hardest, there is nothing more this poor man could do. He has resorted to bartering his own health to try and help his wife thousands of miles away because nothing else has so far worked to bring her home. But there must be a way, there simply must.

A message from the Editor:

Thank you for reading this article. We're more reliant on your support than ever as the shift in consumer habits brought about by coronavirus impacts our advertisers.

If you haven't already, please consider supporting our trusted, fact-checked journalism by taking out a digital subscription.