Location: Iran
Date: January 29, 2021

Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, who has worked with renowned media organizations, has been imprisoned in Iran for nearly five years. Nazanin was sentenced to prison for charges of espionage, which she has denied. The Coalition For Women In Journalism condemns her arbitrary detention and urges Iranian authorities for her immediate release.

Nazanin has worked as a project manager for the Thomson Reuters Foundation, a charitable arm of the Thomson Reuters media group, as well as for BBC Media Action, BBC’s international development charity.  She was arrested in Iran in 2016, where she had travelled from London with her daughter to visit her parents. 

The Iranian authorities have accused Nazanin of planning to topple the Iranian government,  whereas Iran’s Revolutionary Guards claim she was heading a “foreign-linked hostile network” while in Iran.

The organizations she had previously worked for, Thomson Reuters Foundation and BBC Media Action, have issued statements attesting that she was not working in Iran but was there on holiday.

At the time of Nazanin’s arrest, her daughter’s passport was confiscated, and she was sent to live with her grandparents in Iran.  Nazanin appealed to the mothers in Iran in a letter, pleading with the authorities to free her so she can return to London with her daughter.

“I have no hope or motivation after my baby goes. There is no measure to my pain,” she wrote in the letter smuggled out of her prison cell and published online in both Persian and English. She described the thought of not seeing her child as “the deepest torture of them all”.

In June 2019, Nazanin and her husband, Richard Ratcliffe, began a 15-day hunger strike to protest her arrest, to no avail.

CFWIJ expresses utmost concern for Nazanin’s well-being through her ongoing prison sentence. We object to the manufactured charges against her, and we urge authorities to release Nazanin immediately.

The CFWIJ strongly condemns the police brutality against journalists. We demand the immediate return of the press cards seized from the security forces. Policies to intimidate journalists should be abandoned, and journalism should be practiced under the criteria of freedom of the press.

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