Hopes have been raised that the British-Iranian dual national Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe could soon be freed from a Tehran prison after her expected appearance in court was postponed in the wake of a visit to the country by the UK foreign secretary, Boris Johnson.

Zaghari-Ratcliffe’s case was complicated when Johnson wrongly told parliament she was training journalists in Iran, and it had been expected she would face fresh charges of espionage on Sunday, partly based on Johnson’s remarks.

She has been held in jail since April 2016 after being accused of plotting to overthrow the regime.

Some Iranian officials pounced on Johnson’s error, citing it as proof of her guilt and she was brought before a judge on a second charge. She was due to appear in court again on Sunday but her husband, Richard Ratcliffe, said the hearing was put off.

Ratcliffe explained: “I said I thought that, if the foreign secretary had a good Saturday, we might have a good Sunday, with a court case postponed. And so it has come to pass. Today is one of the good days in the past 20 months.

“This weekend we had our first ripple of freedom. We were fearing a bad day and we haven’t had that, which makes it a good day. I guess we will see what the next few days mean.

“But it feels like it a really good sign, almost like we have a momentum – we have had a couple of things that have been positive over the weekend.”

Johnson, who faced calls to resign in the wake of his mistake and belatedly apologised, has been on a two-day visit to Iran, where he has held talks with the president, Hassan Rouhani, and his Iranian counterpart, Mohammad Javad Zarif.



The visit, the first by a British foreign secretary for two years, gave Johnson a chance to underline that the UK remained staunch in its support of the Iran nuclear deal signed in 2015, even if the Iranians pressed him to do more to ease trade between the two countries by pressing UK commercial banks to finance deals. The banks are reluctant to do so fearing they will be subject to swingeing fines by US authorities for breaching continued intrusive US sanctions.



The Foreign Office said Johnson and Rouhani “both spoke forthrightly” and “agreed on the need to make progress in all areas”.



On Sunday, Zaghari-Ratcliffe said she could “see some light” – more than she has before. “The court, the imprisonment emerged all of a sudden out of the blue, so I hope it can disappear out of the blue also – if there is enough will,” she said.

“The other prisoners ask me if I have packed my bags and things. I am not ready to do that just yet. But if they call, I will just run. I don’t care about my things. Apart from the things I have made for people at home, I would give the rest away. Freedom is too precious to think about things.”

Last month, Zaghari-Ratcliffe underwent a health assessment to determine whether or not she was fit to remain in prison. Though the results are unknown, hope had been expressed that she might be released early, having served the minimum sentence required.

Zaghari-Ratcliffe was arrested in 2016 during a holiday visit to show her baby daughter, Gabriella, to her parents. She has worked for BBC Media Action and Thomson Reuters Foundation, the news agency’s charitable arm, though not as a journalist.



Although Johnson’s meeting with Rouhani was regarded as a significant sign of Iranian willingness to engage with the UK, Iranian media accounts highlighted the problems standing in a way of improved relation, especially the belief that the UK could do more both to rein in US led banking sanctions, and President Donald Trump’s criticisms of the Iranian nuclear deal.

Iranian news agencies reported Iran’s parliament’s speaker, Ali Larijani, telling Johnson that US and UK military campaigns since 2000 had plunged the world into ever worsening chaos, and were the major reason for the spread of terrorism. Larijani said: “Instead of voicing anti-Iran sentiments, it would be more rewarding to pay attention to the reality of what is going on in regional countries.”

He also suggested that the all aspects of the Iran nuclear deal, also known as the JCPOA, had not been fully implemented by the UK. He was quoted as saying: “After the JCPOA agreement was reached, unlike certain other European countries that did their best to engage in economic cooperation with Iran, the UK did not take appropriate measures to promote economic cooperation with Iran. You did not even solve the banking obstacles of the Iranian embassy in London.”

But Iranian news sites also claimed Johnson had been relatively even-handed in discussing the disputes between Saudi Arabia and Iran that have spread across the Middle East. The Iranians reported Johnson as telling the Iranians: “Iran, Saudi tensions are not beneficial to any countries and will only result in unstable conditions. The problems between the two countries need to be solved and we intend to help Iran’s attempts to establish stability in the region”.

Johnson also met similar criticisms from Ali Shamkhani, the secretary of Iran’s supreme national security council.

Shamkhani was reported as saying since the JCPOA went into effect, economic relations between the UK and Iran had not developed sufficiently, emphasising that developing banking relations could be a first step for expansion of cooperation in other fields. He claimed the US attitude to the nuclear deal has been “a full-scale catastrophe”.