Iran sentences British woman to five years in prison

A British-Iranian mother detained in Iran for more than 150 days has been sentenced to five years in prison, dealing a heavy blow to her family and the UK government’s efforts to normalise relations with Iran.

Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, an employee of the Thomson Reuters Foundation, the news agency’s charitable arm, was sentenced on charges that “remain secret”, her husband Richard Ratcliffe said.

The 37-year-old, who was accused of plotting to topple the Iranian regime, was arrested at Imam Khomeini airport on 3 April as she was trying to return to Britain after a holiday visiting family with her daughter, Gabriella.

The toddler, who celebrated her second birthday in June without her mother or father, is being looked after by her grandparents in Tehran who speak little English.

In a phone call to her husband on Friday morning, the charity worker from Hampstead in north-west London confirmed her sentence, expressing her disbelief and telling him she would launch an appeal against the ruling.

“But I don’t know how long it will take, how long it will last,” he quoted her as having said. Zaghari-Ratcliffe told her husband she preferred to stay asleep dreaming rather than “wake up each morning and remember where I am”.

The five-year sentence, expected to be served in the Iranian capital’s notorious Evin prison, was handed down by Judge Salavati of the Revolutionary Court.

Zaghari-Ratcliffe’s family have asked her lawyer to appeal against the decision. No date for the appeal has yet been set.

The sentence came just 24 hours after the British and Iranian governments established full diplomatic relations for the first time since 2011. The UK foreign secretary, Boris Johnson, had hailed the upgrade in diplomatic relations as an important moment.

Nicholas Hopton, the newly appointed British ambassador, will now have to demand that Zaghari-Ratcliffe’s sentence be quashed on appeal, or at the very least that embassy officials be given access to her. Iran, which does not recognise dual national status, has so far refused consular access.

The timing of the sentence appeared either an extraordinary coincidence or a calculated attempt by a hardline section of Iranian society to show that it has little interest in improving relations with the UK.

On Friday Richard Ratcliffe branded the sentence, which his wife confirmed to him by phone on Friday morning, “a punishment without a crime”.

He said: “Nazanin’s detention and charges have always felt like she and Gabriella are being held as a political bargaining chip for internal and international politics. The fact that she was sentenced with unrecognisable charges the day after the UK Embassy was upgraded, makes this all the clearer.”