Founder’s Day: The 2025 Sion College Lecture
Speaker: Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe
Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe is a project manager at Thomson Reuters Foundation and has previously worked for the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC) and WHO in Iran, and BBC Media Action. She is a British-Iranian dual national, who was held hostage in Iran between April 2016 and March 2022 as part of a long-running dispute between Britain and Iran. In September 2016 she was sentenced to five years on national security grounds. A second case was opened against her in October 2017 to prevent her eligibility for parole in the wake of a separate court hearing in London over a long running debt dispute between Iran and the UK, over the UK’s failure to deliver tanks to Iran in 1979.
Nazanin was temporarily released on 17 March 2020 during the Covid pandemic, but restricted by electronic tagging and monitoring. At the end of her first sentence in March 2021, she was given a second conviction, and another year’s imprisonment. Following negotiations between Iran and the UK, she was finally released on 16 March 2022, after a long campaign from her family and community, when Britain repaid its outstanding debt of £393.8 million to Iran, and she returned to the UK the next day.
Since her return, Nazanin has campaigned for women’s and prisoner rights in Iran and the UK and written about the meaning of freedom during and after incarceration. Nazanin’s personal experience and that of her family gives her a unique insight into international relations between Iran and the rest of the world. Her experience tested the ties of family love, confronting five foreign secretaries and taking an ordinary family behind the curtain of international hostage diplomacy and secret deals
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