November 19, 2021
An Iranian appeals court has upheld a ruling that adds another year to the prison sentence of Anglo-Iranian Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, who has already completed her original five-year term.
The court ruling also includes a one-year-travel ban abroad, meaning Zaghari-Rat-cliffe cannot leave Iran to join her husband and 7-year-old daughter in London for two more years.
In April, a trial court sentenced Zaghari-Ratcliffe on charges that she had spread “propaganda against the system” when she participated in a protest in front of the Iranian Embassy in London in 2009.
Her husband in London, Richard Ratcliffe, said his wife “is waiting for the call to summon her back” to prison and is “traumatized at the thought of having to go back to jail.”
Employed by the Thomson Reuters Foundation, the charitable arm of the Reuters news agency, Zaghari-Ratcliffe was taken into custody at Tehran’s Imam Khomeini International Airport in April 2016 as she tried to return to her home in Britain after visiting her parents in Iran.
She was then sentenced to five years in prison for allegedly plotting the overthrow of Iran’s government—a charge that she, her supporters, and rights groups deny.
In March 2020, she was allowed to leave Evin Prison because of the coronavirus pandemic and was kept under house arrest at her parents’ home.
Her five-year sentence ended in April, but she was immediately hit with the new charge for joining a demo in London years ago.