Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe’s husband appeals to UN to win her freedom from jail in Iran

The husband of British-Iranian woman Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe and lawyers have filed a special request to the UN to ask it to work with both the UK and Iran to free her from jail in the country.

Richard Ratcliffe said an urgent intervention was needed to secure her release.

And he warned it was inevitable his wife would face an “autumn in court” unless the UK and other countries condemned hostage-taking as a crime.

Iranian media reported this week that Tehran had shelved plans to release Ms Zaghari-Ratcliffe, who has been held for five years, and other Iranian-British prisoners.

Two people were killed last week, one of them British, in a drone strike on an oil tanker off the coast of Oman, widely thought to have been carried out by Iran.

Mr Ratcliffe said: “We have been relatively quiet these past months, waiting and hoping that the government’s negotiations with Iran would finally deliver.

“But this week’s events - Iran’s announcements that hostage negotiations are again on hold, and the attacks on shipping that resulted in two lost lives - were a signal that things have again turned for the worse with the change of government in Iran.”

Iran’s new hardline president, Ebrahim Raisi, who takes over from moderate president Hassan Rouhani, took office just 24 hours before the request to the UN.

In April, Mrs Zaghari-Ratcliffe, who was originally jailed in 2016, was sentenced to a further year in prison after being found guilty of propaganda against the Iranian government.

The UK and Iran are in discussions over a £400m debt that the UK owes for failing to deliver tanks Iran bought in the 1970s, but the government insists the talks are not linked to her detention.

Mr Ratcliffe said: “I met the foreign secretary this week to get his sense of things. He insisted the negotiations had come close, hoped they could be picked up again under the new regime, and that he was determined not to leave any Brits behind.

“I told him I feared the tide had turned, and that a summer of drift would become an autumn in court.

“I see that now as inevitable, unless the UK and the international community takes a much firmer stand against state hostage-taking, and calls it out as a crime.”

An “urgent action request and individual complaint” has been filed on Mrs Zaghari-Ratcliffe’s behalf, asking that the UN’s working group on arbitrary detention talk to the two governments to free her.

An appeal against her second conviction and sentence is due to be heard by Iran’s revolutionary court.

On Wednesday, foreign secretary Dominic Raab condemned her continued detention.

A government spokesperson said: “Iran’s continued arbitrary detention of our dual nationals is unacceptable. We urge the Iranian authorities to release the detainees without any further delay.”

Additional reporting by PA