Letter to the Editor – Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe

My name is Richard Ratcliffe, the husband of Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, a British-Iranian citizen who was imprisoned in Iran while taking our 2-year-old daughter to visit her grandparents.

I am writing to you to ask you to sign a new petition calling for a law that could have helped save my family from years of separation and pain.

There is currently no law to protect British nationals abroad. Since campaigning to help free Nazanin, I’ve met many families who also have loved ones locked up unfairly abroad.

As a British citizen, you or your loved one could be away on a holiday, on a business trip or simply visiting friends and family and you could be arrested and imprisoned – just because. There is no guarantee that the UK Government will step up to protect you or your family.

That’s why I am working with other families who have had loved ones unfairly detained, to launch a new campaign calling for Boris Johnson to give UK citizens, like you and me, the right to protection – will you sign?

Sign now with a click

Many of you will have followed Nazanin’s story and its unfairness and scars. It reveals something about the Iranian legal system and the way it allows innocent people to be abused. But it also says something about the UK, the gap in the way it protects ordinary citizens unfairly imprisoned overseas.

For a long time after Nazanin was imprisoned, it felt like our Foreign Office stood passively by, whilst she was trapped in a cell, stripped of her freedom, separated from our daughter. It took months for the Foreign Office to acknowledge the injustices in her case. They wouldn’t say she was innocent and told us to stay quiet about her suffering. It felt like they were reluctant to protect her out of fear of offending Iran.

We needed to, in the midst of our family’s suffering, run a public campaign to get the Government to do more for Nazanin. It shouldn’t have been so hard.

In some countries they have a law which means every citizen has the right to protection if they are imprisoned abroad – this law might have been a life-saver for our family.

You may not realise you didn’t have the right to protection from the Government. But there are over 2000 British people currently imprisoned overseas – and there is no guarantee the Government will do anything  to support them.

We won’t be able to get the Government’s full attention without people like you speaking out for our rights. So please consider joining our call for Boris Johnson to introduce a new law to protect British citizens imprisoned abroad – so no one else has to go through what Nazanin is going through now.