Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe Sentenced To One-Year Jail Term By Iranian Court

British-Iranian Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe was sentenced to a one-year jail term by an Iranian court for allegedly spreading "propaganda against Iran". The aid worker is also banned from leaving the country for a year after she is released.

Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe had been charged with attending a demonstration outside the Iranian embassy and speaking to a BBC Persian journalist there in 2009. She was found guilty of propaganda activities against the government. In 2017, the prosecutor general said she was held for running a “BBC Persian online journalism course which was aimed at recruiting and training people to spread propaganda against Iran”.

According to her lawyer Hojjat Kermani, an appeal was being lodged on the basis that the charges against her had been laid out of time.

Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe worked for the BBC World Trust Service, now BBC Media Action, from 2009 till 2020. It is an international charity that provides training courses to citizen journalists and bloggers. Her role was described by the charity as “junior and purely administrative”.

In September 2016, she was sentenced to five years in prison for “allegedly plotting to topple the Iranian regime.” She was first arrested in April 2016 when she visited Tehran to see her parents. The second set of charges levied against her were announced in 2020 and no British officials were allowed to observe her trial despite several requests.

Boris Johnson, the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom said the British government would work very hard to secure her release. He said that “I think it is wrong she is there in the first place, and we will be working very hard to secure her release from Iran”. The United Nations has also called for Zaghari-Ratcliffe’s release several times.

Zaghari-Ratcliffe’s husband Richard Ratcliffe launched an online petition that urged Prime Minister Johnson and Iran’s supreme leader Ali Khamenei to take action to secure her safe return.