A British-Iranian woman serving a five-year jail term in Iran after being accused of trying to orchestrate a “soft overthrow” of the Islamic Republic is facing fresh charges that may lead to an additional 16 years in prison, her husband has said.

Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, 38, a project manager at the Thomson Reuters Foundation, has been in jail for 18 months and was due to become eligible for early release next month, but the new trial means she will remain behind bars.



Her husband, Richard Ratcliffe, said that at a court hearing on Sunday inside Tehran’s Evin prison, Zaghari-Ratcliffe was told her case had been reopened and she was facing charges including demonstrating outside the Iranian embassy in London, based on a photo found from accessing her private email account.

He said she was also facing charges relating to her work at the Thomson Reuters Foundation, the charitable arm of the news agency of the same name, and her previous work at the BBC. The judge purportedly claimed both organisations were “specifically working to overthrow the regime”.



Judicial authorities in Iran have not yet confirmed there will be a new trial.

Zaghari-Ratcliffe was arrested in April 2016 when she and her young daughter, Gabriella, were about to return to the UK after a family visit to Iran. Since then she has spent most of her time in Evin while Gabriella, now three, has been in the care of her mother’s Iranian family, who are only able to visit her during regular prison visits. Richard Ratcliffe has said his daughter is losing her grasp of English.

Ratcliffe said his wife and the rest of the family were bewildered by the new development in her case. “I have told Nazanin that these are just games by the IRGC [Revolutionary Guards], games that look more and more desperate. Inventing new charges to prevent her early release does not make them look intimidating, it makes them look foolish,” he said.

“It also brings the integrity of the Iranian legal system into question, as the IRGC play their games with my family’s lives [and] look to extract more privileges from the Iranian and UK governments. They are treating their justice system like a bazaar, making up stories to get a higher price. They are bringing their country to shame.”



The Revolutionary Guards, the elite forces responsible for Zaghari-Ratcliffe’s arrest, have accused her of attempting to orchestrate a soft overthrow of the Islamic Republic – charges that her husband has vehemently denied.



There have been indications that Zaghari-Ratcliffe may be a victim of Iran’s animosity towards the BBC. She was a project assistant at the BBC’s charity Media Action in 2008/9. Iranian authorities loathe the BBC because of its Persian service, which is watched by millions of Iranians via illegal satellite dishes.



BBC Persian staff have been victims of a campaign of intimidation and smears orchestrated by Iranian authorities in recent years. In August, in the latest crackdown against the corporation’s Iranian employees, it emerged that Iran had imposed an asset freeze on more than 150 BBC Persian journalists and former contributors.



Zaghari-Ratcliffe’s original conviction was upheld by Iran’s supreme court in April. A string of dual nationals from other western nationals including the US also languish in Iranian jails, but exactly how many is unclear. Kamal Foroughi, a 78-year-old British-Iranian businessman, has been imprisoned in Iran since 2011.

Tulip Siddiq, the Labour MP for Hampstead and Kilburn, said the latest charges brought against her constituent were “an outrage and must not be allowed to stand”. She called Zaghari-Ratcliffe’s case a travesty and urged the UK government to act.



“These developments are particularly cruel at a time when her family had increasingly hoped that she would be granted temporary release. With the possibility of 16 years being added to her sentence, it is high time the government intervened with tangible effect,” she said.



“There is a clear pattern of Iran treating British dual nationals in this way, and the government’s soft-ball approach to the Iranian authorities seems to be doing little to improve their plight.”

Theresa May raised Zaghari-Ratcliffe’s case with the Iranian president, Hassan Rouhani, on the sidelines of the UN general assembly last month. Rouhani was also pressed on the matter during a CNN interview and suggested it was out of his control because the judiciary acted independently of his government.



Monique Villa, the Thomson Reuters Foundation chief executive, said Zaghari-Ratcliffe was a “political hostage” being subjected to “another mockery of justice” by the Revolutionary Guards.

“These charges are linked to her work at BBC Media Action and at the Thomson Reuters Foundation,” Villa said. “This is a complete invention as the Thomson Reuters Foundation doesn’t work in Iran and has no programme or dealings with Iran. We continue to assert that she is 100% innocent and that these ludicrous charges must be dropped immediately, and Nazanin released and reunited with her daughter Gabriella and her husband Richard.”

She added: “This inhumane treatment is breaking up a young family and has already caused irreparable damage to Nazanin’s physical and mental health. What happened yesterday and the description that the family has given is harrowing. Hearing that Nazanin, who we know to be a very strong woman, almost collapsed in court is another sign of how traumatised she must be now.”

