ERBIL, Kurdistan Region — British Prime Minister Boris Johnson demanded the “immediate release” of the British-Iranian aid worker Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe and other detained dual British-Iranian nationals in a phone call with the Iranian president on Wednesday, his spokesperson has said.
"The prime minister raised the case of Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe and other British-Iranian dual nationals detained in Iran and demanded their immediate release,” a spokesperson for the prime minister said following the call with Hassan Rouhani.
"He [Johnson] said that while the removal of Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe's ankle monitor was welcome, her continued confinement remains completely unacceptable and she must be allowed to return to her family in the UK,” they added.
Ratcliffe’s lawyer Hojjat Kermani told Iranian state media outlet IRNA on March 7 that she had been released – though a second court hearing r has been set for March 14.
Zaghari-Ratcliffe had been under house arrest at her parents’ home with an ankle tag in Tehran since March 2020, when she was moved from Evin prison in the Iranian capital as part of government measures to curb the spread of coronavirus among inmates.
The 42-year-old was on her way home to London when she was arrested at Tehran's Imam Khomeini airport in April 2016 following a visit to her parents for the spring holiday of Newroz. The charity worker was an employee of the Thomson Reuters Foundation at the time.
In September 2016, she was convicted of attempting to "topple the Iranian government"– charges that were not made known to her family until much later.
RELATED: 'Keeping home alive': The fight to free Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe
“We welcome the removal of Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe’s ankle tag, but Iran continues to put her and her family through a cruel and an intolerable ordeal,” British Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab said following the removal of her ankle tag.
“She must be released permanently so she can return to her family in the UK. We will continue to do all we can to achieve this,” he added.
Dual nationals from various countries have been detained in Iran, in what campaigners and the British government says is a policy of hostage-taking aimed at pressuring the West.
Dual British-Iranian national Anoosheh Ashoori is also serving a sentence in Iran on charges of “cooperating with a hostile state against the Islamic Republic” according to confessions Amnesty International call “torture-tainted.”
Labour rights activist and British-Iranian national, Mehran Raoof, is arbitrarily detained and is being held in prolonged solitary confinement, Amnesty International wrote in February.
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