Verdict is expected next week on whether Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe will have to serve five-year sentence for unspecified offence

A British-Iranian woman being held in Tehran’s notorious Evin prison has appeared in an appeals court, using the last legal opportunity to challenge her five-year jail sentence.



Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, a project manager with the Thomson Reuters Foundation, the news agency’s charitable arm, was found guilty in September on unspecific charges relating to national security.



On Wednesday, she attended a court session in the Iranian capital that lasted up to three hours, her husband told the Guardian. Few details have emerged about the hearing but a verdict is expected to be announced next week.



The exact reason why the 38-year-old has been convicted in Iran is still unclear, but the Revolutionary Guards, which arrested her at the airport in April while she was about to return to the UK after a family visit, have accused her of fomenting a “soft overthrow” of the Islamic republic.

“What I know is that the appeals happened and went on for three hours, the family weren’t able to go but Nazanin was there and her lawyer was there,” said Richard Ratcliffe. “There were lots of revolutionary guards there from both Kerman’s branch and the Tehran branch.”



After her arrest at the airport, Zaghari-Ratcliffe was initially transferred to the southern Iranian city of Kerman, where she was held for several weeks in an unknown location before being taken to Evin prison. Her then 22-month-old daughter, Gabriella, who was accompanying Zaghari-Ratcliffe during her visit to Iran, has been placed in the care of her mother’s Iranian family.



“The lawyer sounded quite calm on the phone, Nazanin’s family are not calm,” Ratcliffe said. “It’s very hard to read what any of it would mean but [with] lots of people [having] turned up from Kerman, I guess it means that there would be a thorough review of what the case is – three hours is as long as the original trial. But in terms of whether it means it is a positive thing or a negative, it’s hard to read at this point. I’m certainly not hopeful, but am trying not to be too bleak.”

According to Amnesty International, Iranian authorities have hinted that Zaghari-Ratcliffe’s arrest is connected to the 2014 imprisonment of several employees of an Iranian technology news website. They were given lengthy prison terms for participating in a BBC journalism training course. Zaghari-Ratcliffe was a project assistant at the BBC’s Media Action, the broadcaster’s international development charity, in 2008-09.

Ratcliffe has claimed his wife is being held to be used as a pawn by the Iranian authorities in exchange for their political deals with the UK. Iranian officials have denied this but Iran has arrested other dual nationals in recent months in a string of cases that activists say demonstrate a pattern in Tehran’s behaviour.

UK woman jailed in Iran at 'breaking point' after starting hunger strike Read more

Last year, Iran notably released the Washington Post journalist Jason Rezaian alongside a number of other Iranian-Americans, swapping them with a number of Iranian nationals held in US jails for crimes including violating economic sanctions.



Zaghari-Ratcliffe’s prolonged detention has brought much embarrassment for president Hassan Rouhani’s administration, which has been trying to mend relations with the west. But under the Iranian constitution, Rouhani’s hands are tied with respect to judiciary affairs.

Rouhani and the judiciary chief are at odds and in recent days, the president has been involved in a public spat with the head of the judiciary over other issues, including the financial transparency of the institutions under their control.



Ratcliffe said he last spoke to his wife on Christmas Day. Zaghari-Ratcliffe, who was previously described as being at breaking point, has recently been removed from solitary confinement and taken to Evin’s women’s wards alongside other political prisoners including journalist Reyhaneh Tabatabaei and leading activist Narges Mohammadi, and a number of Baha’i women held because of their faith.



“She’s just had a family visit on that day and she had a birthday cake because her birthday is on Boxing Day, and she was also just being told that she was going to be moved to general cells, so her mood was a little bit more positive,” he recalled. “There was some fight in her.”

