Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe says she will 'never forgive' Iran for imprisonment

Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe says she will "never forgive" Iran for imprisoning her ahead of her speaking at London's Longford Lecture.

The British-Iranian dual citizen 46 year was detained in Iran for six years.

She was first arrested in April 2016 whilst on holiday, visiting her family, with her daughter, Gabriella.

In September 2016, she was found guilty of plotting to topple the Iranian government and sentenced to five years in prison.

In April 2021, she was given a further year and a one-year travel ban, after being found guilty of propaganda against the Iranian government. She lost her appeal on this second conviction.

After years of campaigning, she was freed in March 2022.

"They wasted my life in prison. They put me in prison for something that had nothing to do with me," she said.

Nazanin's daughter was 22 months old when she was arrested. The pair were reunited when Gabriella was seven.

She also left behind her husband Richard who begun the ReleaSe campaign which started with a letter to David Cameron, asking for her release.

Her family believed she was arrested for a long-running dispute between Iran and Britain.

She continued: "We should not live in a world that people are put in prison because of their political affiliations.

"But I was in a political ward because they couldn't mix me with kind of normal usual crime and, you know, kind of that kind of general ward.

"So in that political ward, we had two weapons. One of them was putting a statement out a political prisoner. The other one was going on hunger strike, which was the most extreme way of showing protest, which is not advised, obviously."

Nazanin protested with hunger strikes across her time in prison, and her husband Richard joined her in the UK.

"We both have reached a point that we had to decide. Our daughter was going back to the UK and she was going to go back to school. But also she was somehow the most the point of strength for me," she continued.

"People go on hunger strike for various different reasons, for release, for medical care, for the injustice of adding to their sentences or whatever. But at the end of the day, by and large, you don't achieve it.

"But what happens is you bring your story to the attention so people care about it. People will know more about what has been happening to you."

During these times of protest, she says they took away he access to visits and calls in hopes she would stop but Richard was able to continue back at home.

"I would hear from other people that Richard has been blocking the entrance to the Iranian embassy in London...they would come to me and try to talk me out of it. Not because of my health and not because I was putting myself in danger, but because they wanted him to move and for their business to reopen," she said.

Nazanin believes the turning point came in 2021. Richard went on hunger strike again for 3 weeks. For part of this protest he was sat outside the foreign office. Nazanin believed he "could not be ignored".

"Because I think everything was just, dare I say the emperor had no clothes," she explained.

"He was in November, you know, in the street in front of the Foreign Office and he could not be ignored. And I think that's when the government decided to solve our problem."

Since Nazanin was freed, she says it's been an adjustment.

She explains: "I mean, all that kind of the euphoric moment of freedom and release that I had spent years thinking about how it would look like it was all of a sudden unfulfilling and unsatisfying.

"Just because I have been in prison for a long time, but also I have left so many people behind and freedom wasn't really complete. And I didn't feel like for a very long time, every day I felt, I'm eating this. My friends in prison aren't.

"I can open the window and have a fresh air. My friends in prison can't.

"And I could either just ignore the fact that I have been to prison and try to pretend it didn't happen and that was like a wild nightmare and just get on with my life. But then I was confident that it's going to come back and haunt me.

"So instead of doing that, I decided to accept, you know, just like someone who has cancer, you know, you have to accept that that's part of your life and you just have to live with it."

Nazanin will be speaking at the Longford Lecture about prison reform, relating her experience to the current prison system in the UK.

The Longford Lecture is an annual event that started in 2002.

It's streamed to prisoners, and aims to reflect on prison policy and the need for broader social reform.

In recent years, the lecture has been broadcast live on National Prison Radio so prison cells around the country have access.

Nazanin added: "I felt this is going to give me an opportunity to share what I went through, because I think part of my experience, it goes very well with what the people who are in prison in the UK are experiencing.

"We practically live in the same world, but in different contexts in Iran and in the uk, and we share common kind of problems, common struggles in prison."

"I understand that, you know, people who are in prison will have access to the lecture, will be broadcast live on radio and they will be listening to [it]...it's very nerve wracking to think about that side of it, because to think that people who are in prison will listen to somebody who has come out of prison, that would be something which gives me a responsibility to put it right and to talk about there is hope and you will eventually come out of it."

Nazanin has also been working with other people that have been unjustly detained and compares her jail time to Imprisonment for Public Protection (IPP) sentences.

IPP sentences were a type of indeterminate sentence that was available in England and Wales from 2005 to 2012 but many still remain behind bars.

She explains: "I think that actually that is what relates my story to what's happening in the UK in terms of the uncertainty of some of the cases like IPP prisoners that as a political prisoner, as a hostage, basically you don't have any specific date of release. There is nothing you can do to boost your release.

"There is nothing you can do to put you in more trouble because you're not there because of what you have done, you're there because of a political agenda."

Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe on how politics played into her arrest.

At the time of her imprisonment, Nazanin was told her imprisoning was due to an unpaid debt between Iran and Britain.

The former foreign secretary Jeremy Hunt said Iran was linking her case and the unpaid debt in 2021 but the UK government never admitted this. Prime Minister Boris Johnson also said they were "two entirely seperate issues".

"In my case, what happened was as a hostage, you don't know what is the date of your release because there are negotiations happening behind bars...You know, I was a mother, I had a young child, I had a family, my parents," she said.

"Nobody cared about any of that. All they cared was I was used as a political pawn to achieve whatever the agenda was. And that was uncertain. That was disconcerting. That was frustrating.

"So I think that kind of relates my story in a way to the uncertainty of, like I said, the IPP prisoners that there is no end to, you know, to their sentence and there is no specific release date for them. And that has to be extremely frustrating for them."

As Nazanin moves forwards with her life, and her family, she wants a message of hope and solidarity to stand out from her story.

"My one and only message is it will end," she says.

"We just have to find ways to connect us to the life we have outside the walls. It's difficult, but I think we are stronger together.

"Solidarity is key in prison, and I think what made all of us go through that was we were carrying one single pain...but we carried it all together and we helped each other, regardless of whatever differences we had. And that was a unique experience."

You can watch Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe's Longford Lecture from 6:30pm on Monday 11 November at www.longfordtrust.org