“Sending Money in a Suitcase to Tehran Has Made the Islamic Republic Addicted to This Practice”

Shirin Ebadi, Nobel Peace Prize laureate, spoke with Radio Farda about the appeals court’s confirmation of the prison sentence for Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, an Iranian-British citizen.

Shirin Ebadi: I am deeply saddened that the appeals court made the same mistake as the lower court. Unfortunately, there are several branches in the Revolutionary Court that we used to mockingly call “opinion-confirmation branches.” These are courts that in appeals are completely obedient to the Ministry of Intelligence and simply confirm verbatim the initial ruling issued based on the Ministry of Intelligence’s request. These are not actually appeals courts; they are opinion-confirmation courts.

Ms. Ebadi, Iranian media outlets say that Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe has been accused by the detaining authority of soft overthrow. However, Richard Ratcliffe, Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe’s husband, said this Monday that his wife still has not been informed of what her charges are. How do you interpret the lack of disclosure of charges despite her conviction?

This is another example of how our courts are influenced by security personnel. It is another sign of the lack of independence of Iran’s courts and the arrest of Ms. Zaghari is essentially a form of hostage-taking in order to make demands on the British government for funds that the Iranian government believed it was entitled to.

The action that Mr. Obama took with the Iranian government by sending money in a suitcase for the freedom of four Iranian-American hostages who were imprisoned, including a Washington Post reporter, has made the Islamic Republic addicted to this practice and put people with dual citizenship at risk. So that Iran can achieve its unreasonable demands by detaining them.

Ms. Ebadi, the Human Rights Activists Center, an institution whose management and presidency you oversee, reported twenty days ago that officials of Iran’s judicial system did not allow Nazanin Zaghari to even have phone contact with her relatives during Nowruz. Despite the fact that this woman has a two-year-old daughter.

In fact, the pressure on Nazanin comes from the fact that the Iranian government wants to force the British government to pay the ransom that Iran has demanded. According to information we have, for twenty days she was unable to even make a phone call to her family in Tehran and ask about her child’s condition. For all sorts of reasons, they cancel the weekly three-minute phone call. They rarely give her the opportunity for glass-barrier visits. It is not that she has had no visitation opportunities so far, but they give her this opportunity very rarely and try every excuse to prevent these visits and calls so that Nazanin is put under more pressure.

Ms. Ebadi, as reports suggest, the British ambassador to Iran has also failed to have a meeting with Ms. Zaghari-Ratcliffe.

Ms. Zaghari, since she holds British citizenship, must be able to meet with the British ambassador and use the legal services that the embassy provides her. But she has been deprived of this right from day one. The reason is actually because of further pressure on this woman. She has been taken hostage.

But the apparent reason that the Iranian government states is that we do not accept her second citizenship and she came to Iran with an Iranian passport and therefore from our perspective she is Iranian and the British ambassador has no right to visit her in prison. However, at the same time I would like to add that in equal circumstances, meaning Iranian citizens who hold citizenship of another country and have been imprisoned there, such as those in prison in Malaysia, such as those in prison in Armenia or Georgia, the Iranian ambassador goes and meets with them and provides legal services to them as well.

Including a woman who was accused in India of involuntary manslaughter of a child, Mr. Zarif and the Iranian ambassador went and spoke and facilitated the release of this woman. But they do not allow the same action for Iranian nationals who also hold citizenship of other countries and are imprisoned in Iran to enjoy the same rights. And this is nothing but a lack of independence of Iran’s courts.

Source: Radio Farda