An Iranian woman working for the British Council faces ten years in an Iranian prison after losing her final appeal against espionage charges before Iran’s supreme court.

Aras Amiri, a 33-year-old permanent resident of the UK and a student at Kingston University, was arrested in March 2018 while visiting family in Iran and accused of spying for the British government.

She was sentenced to ten years in prison in May for “cultural infiltration by the British intelligence services in Iranian internal affairs”.

Ms Amiri appealed against the sentence in a letter to the head of Iran’s judiciary but the supreme court ruled over the weekend to uphold her conviction and her prison term.

Ms Amiri said in her letter that she was arrested because she refused to cooperate with Iranian intelligence officials who wanted her to spy for them in Britain.

“I directly rejected their offer for cooperation and told them that I can only work in my own field and nothing else,” she wrote.

Iran often tries to pressure its expatriate citizens to cooperate with intelligence work.

Ms Amiri is likely to serve out her prison sentence in Tehran’s Evin prison, where Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, a British-Iranian charity worker, is serving a five-year prison term on allegations she tried overthrow the government.