Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe

Emily Thornberry Excerpts

Monday 13th November 2017 Commons Chamber

[Emily Thornberry (Islington South and Finsbury) (Lab)]

(Urgent Question): To ask the Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs to make a statement on the case of British-Iranian national Ms Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe.

[The Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs (Boris Johnson)]

I should like to make a statement on the case of Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, in response to the right hon. Lady.

The whole House will join me in expressing our deep concern about the ordeal of this young mother, who has spent the last 19 months in jail in Iran. Every hon. Member will join the Government in urging the Iranian authorities to release her on humanitarian grounds.

I spoke by phone to her husband, Richard Ratcliffe, yesterday, and we agreed to meet later this week. I told Mr Ratcliffe that the whole country is behind him and we all want to see his wife home safely.

In view of the understandable concern, I propose to describe the background to Mrs Zaghari-Ratcliffe’s case and the efforts the Government are making to secure her release. In April last year, she was visiting her relations in Iran, along with her daughter, Gabriella, who was then only 22 months old, when she was arrested at Imam Khomeini airport in Tehran while trying to board her flight back to the UK. The British Government have no doubt that Mrs Zaghari-Ratcliffe was in Iran on holiday and that that was the sole purpose of her visit. As I said in the House last week, my remarks on the subject before the Foreign Affairs Committee could and should have been clearer. I acknowledge that words I used were open to being misinterpreted, and I apologise to Mrs Zaghari-Ratcliffe and her family if I have inadvertently caused them any further anguish.

The House should bear in mind that Iran’s regime, and no one else, has chosen to separate this mother from her infant daughter for reasons that even it finds difficult to explain or describe. On 9 September 2016, Mrs Zaghari-Ratcliffe was brought to a secret trial and sentenced to five years in prison, supposedly for plotting to overthrow the Islamic Republic. The House will note that so far as we can tell, no further charges have been brought against her and no further sentence has been imposed since that occasion over a year ago.

Eleven days after Mrs Zaghari-Ratcliffe was sentenced, my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister raised her case with President Hassan Rouhani of Iran in New York on 20 September 2016. Two days later, I raised her case with my Iranian counterpart, Mr Zarif. For the sake of completeness, the House should know that the previous Prime Minister, David Cameron, raised Mrs Zaghari-Ratcliffe’s imprisonment with President Rouhani on 9 August 2016, and my predecessor as Foreign Secretary, my right hon. Friend the Member for Runnymede and Weybridge (Mr Hammond), wrote to the Iranian Foreign Minister about her plight, and other consular cases, on 29 August 2016. [Official Report, 14 November 2017, Vol. 631, c. 1MC.]

At every meeting with our Iranian counterparts, my colleagues and I have taken every opportunity to raise the cases of Mrs Zaghari-Ratcliffe and other nationals held in Iranian jails. We have expressed our concerns at every level—official, ministerial, and prime ministerial—on every possible occasion during the 19 months that she has been in jail. In addition, Mr Ratcliffe has held regular meetings with my right hon. Friend the Member for Bournemouth East (Mr Ellwood), formerly the Minister for the Middle East, and with the current Minister for the Middle East, my right hon. Friend the Member for North East Bedfordshire (Alistair Burt).

A situation where a British mother is held in these circumstances is bound to cast a shadow over Britain’s relations with Iran at a moment when, in the aftermath of the agreement of the nuclear deal in July 2015 and the easing of sanctions, we had all hoped to witness a genuine improvement. So I shall travel to Iran myself later this year to review the full state of our bilateral relations and to drive home the strength of feeling in this House, and in the country at large, about the plight of Mrs Zaghari-Ratcliffe, and other consular cases. In order to maximise the chances of achieving progress, I would venture to say that hon. Members should place the focus of responsibility on those who are keeping Mrs Zaghari-Ratcliffe behind bars and who have the power to release her whenever they so choose. We should be united in our demand that the humanitarian reasons for releasing her are so overwhelming that if Iran cares about its reputation in this country, then its leaders will do now what is manifestly right. I commend this statement to the House.

[Mr Speaker]

Just for the avoidance of doubt, the Foreign Secretary has responded to an urgent question in the course of which he has very properly made remarks, but it is important, as others in the House can testify from past experience, to distinguish between a response to an urgent question, on the one hand, and the proffering by Government of a statement, on the other.

[Emily Thornberry]

Thank you very much, Mr Speaker, for granting this urgent question. How unfortunate it is that we need to ask an urgent question as opposed to getting a statement.

Let me say at the outset that whatever strong feelings we have about Iran’s actions in this case, I am sure we are all joined in sending our thoughts to those affected by yesterday’s earthquake on the Iran-Iraq border. I am grateful to the Foreign Secretary for returning from Brussels to answer this urgent question. Perhaps he reflected that the last time a Minister of State was asked to answer an urgent question on behalf of a Cabinet Minister, the Cabinet Minister lasted only 24 hours.

I hope that we can make more progress today than we were able to make on the same issue last week. Let us start by clarifying the points on which there is absolutely no difference between us. First and foremost, we all want Nazanin to be brought home as soon as possible. No one who has listened over recent days to the heartbreaking testimony of Richard Ratcliffe can be in any doubt about how urgent it is, for Nazanin’s mental and physical health, that she is returned to her family immediately.

Secondly, if that can be done, as has been suggested, by conferring diplomatic status on Nazanin, that would obviously be welcome, although I would be grateful if the Foreign Secretary clarified how that could be achieved—how we can free this innocent British mother without opening up a Grace Mugabe precedent, which might make it possible to use the same tactic in Britain to help a guilty foreign national to escape justice? Thirdly, we can all agree that the responsibility for Nazanin’s incarceration and mistreatment lies entirely with the Iranian authorities, and we all unite in urging for her freedom to be restored.

On those points, we are in full agreement, but let me turn to two key issues on which we have so far differed and, frankly, we continue to differ. First, the Foreign Secretary argued last week that his comments to the Select Committee did not have “any connection whatever” with the latest threats by the Iranian authorities to extend Nazanin’s sentence, and that it was simply untrue to suggest otherwise. That is entirely contradicted by what was said by the Iranian courts last weekend, and by what was said on the Iranian judiciary’s website and on Iranian state TV. All of them said explicitly that the Foreign Secretary’s remarks were the basis of their renewed action against Nazanin. We know from the evidence of Richard Ratcliffe that when Nazanin was told of the remarks and saw how the Iranian authorities would exploit them, she became hugely distressed and upset. So will the Foreign Secretary today accept the impact that his words have had and the distress that has been caused to Nazanin, and apologise properly for that—apologise not for upsetting people, but for getting it wrong?

Secondly, last week the Foreign Secretary was asked several times to do one very simple thing, and that was simply to admit that he had made a mistake—not that his remarks had been taken out of context or misconstrued, but that they were simply wrong. He has, so far, refused to make that clear, and that refusal was compounded yesterday by his good friend the Environment Secretary. Even after all the debate on this issue, the Environment Secretary still, incredibly, claimed that we “don’t know” why Nazanin is in Iran. We do.

It is not good enough. If it is a matter of pride that the Foreign Secretary is refusing to admit that he made a mistake, I feel bound to say to him that his pride matters not one ounce compared to Nazanin’s freedom. After a week of obfuscation and bluster, will he finally take the opportunity today to state simply and unequivocally, for the removal of any doubt either here or in Tehran, that he simply got it wrong?

[Boris Johnson]

I am more than happy to say again what I said to the right hon. Lady last week: yes, of course, I apologise for the distress and the suffering that have been caused by the impression that I gave that the Government believed—that I believed—that Mrs Zaghari-Ratcliffe was in Iran in a professional capacity. She was there on holiday, and that is the view of—[Hon. Members: “Say sorry!”] I do apologise, and of course I retract any suggestion that she was there in a professional capacity. Opposition Members must have heard that from me about a dozen times.

The right hon. Lady asked an important question about diplomatic protection and how that would work. She is absolutely right that that is a question that Richard Ratcliffe himself has raised with me. All I can say is that I will be answering Mr Ratcliffe. I cannot give her an answer today; I would rather answer Mr Ratcliffe in person. I am delighted to say that I am seeing him tomorrow, and I will be explaining the position on diplomatic protection. As I said last week, he has requested to come to Tehran. I do not know whether that will be possible, but we will see what we can do.