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Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe is a British-Iranian woman who according to Amnesty International has been falsely imprisoned in Iran since the 3 April 2016. Nazanin was arrested as she was leaving Iran after visiting her parents with her one year old daughter Gabriella. Up until now Nazanin is yet to return to the UK and be reunited with her daughter. Upon her arrest, she was given no information of any charges and was detained in solitary confinement for 45 days where she was prevented from communicating with her family or legal counsel. In fact, she was only granted authorisation to speak to a lawyer three days before her trial, which left them no time to prepare a case for her defence. As a result of this Nazanin was sentenced to five years imprisonment for ‘membership of an illegal group’, of which the evidence provided was her work for the UK media charity Thomson Reuters Foundation.
Since Nazanin has not committed any actual crime, she can be considered a prisoner of conscience. This term was coined by Peter Beneson in his 1961 article ‘The Forgotten Prisoners’ and can be defined as ‘any person who is physically restrained (by imprisonment or otherwise) from expressing (in any form of words or symbols) any opinion which he honestly holds and which does not advocate or condone personal violence.’ Essentially, Nazanin has been jailed for exercising her human rights of freedom of speech and association.
Since her imprisonment Nazanin’s health has deteriorated rapidly, she is in severe pain, is losing her hair and according to her husband has recently been concerned about lumps on her breast and that’s just her physical health. Iranian prisons have a dark reputation of denying their prisoners adequate healthcare, and Nazanin’s condition is proof of this. In addition, understandably this ordeal has taken its toll on her mental health and she has even wrote a suicidal letter to her family. It is baffling that this is being allowed to continue when the inhuman treatment by Iranian authorities has resulted in an innocent woman becoming physically ill and suicidal.
Despite being party to some human rights treaties, Iran is yet to ratify the Convention against Torture and Other Cruel Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment and the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women. Although this legislation is not perfect, and there is no guarantee that Iran would comply with its obligations after ratification, it could have potentially altered the fate of Nazanin. Shabnam Moinipour’s analyses of the human rights dialogue in Iran between 1990 and 2016 suggests that Iran has developed an effective human rights discourse on the face of it, “regurgitating what is expected to be heard”, however this dialogue is simply a mechanism of maintaining reputation and in fact the human rights abuses in Iran are prolific. Unfortunately, Mrs Zaghari-Ratcliffe is one of many victims of human rights abuses in Iran and one of many UK-Iranian nationals falsely imprisoned in the country. The system of human rights protection provided by the UN can be criticised for being highly political and therefore largely ineffective. States are unwilling to criticise other states with poor human rights records due to fear of political ramifications, and this simply is not acceptable. The mode of human rights protection must accept amendments in order to be more effective in practice.