Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe is free – but unanswered questions remain

Amid all the horrors of recent months and years, Westminster witnessed a moment of unalloyed joy this week as MPs welcomed the release of Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe.

Tributes were paid to Liz Truss, who seems to have taken a more tenacious approach to the long-standing crisis that some of her predecessors as foreign secretary – notably Boris Johnson, who added to Nazanin’s problems by wrongly telling MPs she’d been training journalists in Iran.

And there were plaudits from all sides of the house for Labour MPs Tulip Siddiq and Janet Daby, who have campaigned tirelessly for Nazanin and fellow detainee Anoosheh Ashoori.

But beneath the evident relief and delight felt by all were a host of questions which have been unanswered in the affair, and which look set to remain unanswered for a long time to come.

Essentially, it boils down to the question of whether all the diplomatic efforts, the campaigning and the foot-in-mouth blunders in Britain had any bearing on the outcome, or was it simply the mullahs in Tehran waiting until the time was right for them?

Many MPs are uneasy about whether the £400m handed over by Britain in settlement of a long-standing debt was effectively seen in Tehran as a ransom payment. If it was, they ask, what is to stop Iran pocketing the money and doing it again? And how can assurances that the cash will be spent for humanitarian purposes be enforced? Truss of course rejects any suggestion that Britain has breached its rule of not paying ransoms for hostages.

The UK has long accepted that it should return the money – paid by the Shah of Iran for Chieftain tanks which had not been delivered by the time he was deposed in the Islamic revolution of 1979 – and indeed paid sums into court to cover it as long ago as 2002.

In UK eyes, the issue has been finding an imaginative way of getting the money to Iran in a way which doesn’t breach any of the multitude of sanctions which the country has been subjected to over the past two decades – particularly US measures which would mean any commercial bank involved in the transaction being blacklisted by Washington.

But in Tehran, these quibbles were seen as stalling tactics, and comments made to Nazanin herself suggested that the clerical administration saw her and fellow detainees as the only levers they had to exert pressure for a resolution.

Truss has kept her lips sealed over the precise mechanism that was used to make the transaction, saying that confidentiality was a fundamental condition of the deal – though she has not made clear whether it was Iran or the UK who insisted on secrecy.

She has pointed to the election of a new Iranian government under president Ebrahim Raisi last June as a tipping point which may have helped break the stalemate.

It is understood that the transaction did not involve handing over cash to Iran – as Barack Obama did when he flew a plane loaded with pallets stacked with euro and Swiss franc banknotes to Tehran in 2016. But Truss insists it was provided in a way which makes her confident it will be used for humanitarian purposes, and not to fund terrorism, as some MPs fear.

This has prompted a buzz of speculation. Was the debt paid in kind, through the provision of vaccine supplies or other aid? Was it deposited in the Omani central bank to be passed on to Tehran, so no western fingerprints were on the final transaction?

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Did it come in the form of some sort of credit arrangement for the purchase of approved goods? Is there an oversight arrangement of some kind to make sure it is used for humanitarian purposes? And does any of this matter, given that if Tehran has an extra £400m for good causes, that frees up the same amount to be spent elsewhere?

On a broader level, was this deal just a tiny part of a wider move to welcome Iran back into the international community – possibly also including a new agreement on its nuclear energy ambitions – now that sanctions on Russia have suddenly made its oil so much more attractive to western buyers?

Over the days since the deal was sealed, Truss has been talking in mysterious terms about a plan she is hatching with Canada for an international method for responding to future hostage and unlawful detention crises, with the hope of making them a less attractive option for rogue regimes in future.

But as Nazanin’s experience shows, any system she can devise will struggle to resolve the difficult compromises which always arise when an innocent individual is used as a pawn in the game of geopolitics.

Yours,

Andrew Woodcock

Political editor