September 06, 2019
Prison authorities have cut Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe’s contacts with her daughter from once a week to once a month and barred her from ever calling her husband again, the BBC reported.
“Richard Ratcliffe [her husband] said new rules mean she cannot make international calls to him in London—and can only see their five-year-old daughter once a month,” the BBC said on its website August 20.
Nazanin has used the telephone calls to her husband to report on her treatment. Richard then contacts the British media and thus keeps her case in the public eye across Britain. The ban on telephone contacts would appear to be an effort to reduce the amount of news about her case that gets into the public media.
The reduction in the visits by her daughter would appear to be little more than retribution.
The campaign being run by her husband issued a statement that quoted Nazanin as saying in her last call to her husband, “I am so upset. I feel like I could suffocate. I can’t even think what to do. I haven’t cried so loud in the middle of the ward for ages. How cruel they are. How unjust this is.”
Zaghari-Ratcliffe, a project manager with the Thomson Reuters Foundation, was arrested in 2016 at Imam Khomeini airport as she headed back to Britain with her daughter after a family visit, and was subsequently sentenced to five years in jail after being convicted of plotting to overthrow Iran’s clerical establishment.
Her family and a charity organization defending her, which operates independently of Thomson Reuters and Reuters News, deny the charge.
