July 19, 2019
The Ratcliffe husband and wife team have given up their hunger strikes after 15 days—she in Evin prison in Tehran, he on the sidewalk in front of the Iranian embassy in London.
The pair was trying to draw attention to Nazanin-Zaghari-Ratcliffe’s plight after more than three years in prison accused of working as an agent for Britain.
Richard Ratcliffe said he had talked by phone with his wife and that she said she ended the hunger strike June 29 with a bowl of porridge and some apple and a banana.
He ended his own hunger strike when he heard from her.
He told BBC Radio’s “Today” program, “It was getting hard for me, but I’m sure it was much harder for her. I’m relieved because I wouldn’t have wanted her to push it much longer.”
Before ending the hunger strike, he said he was feeling sluggish and slow. His sister, a physician, and other family members had been monitoring his health.
His mother said, “This has been different from what I expected. The sheer amount of support and goodwill, particularly from Iranians, has been overwhelming.”
Supporters covered the metal barriers erected by the embassy with brightly colored post-it notes with messages.
While sitting in a chair and sleeping in a tent outside the Iranian Embassy, Ratcliffe was visited by journalists, passers-by and more than 100 members of the British Parliament including Jeremy Corbyn, the leader of the opposition Labour Party.
The hunger strike drew much additional media attention in Britain to his wife’s plight. Through her husband’s constant efforts to keep his wife in the news, Nazanin’s case has gotten more media attention in England than probably all the other dual- nationals that Iran has imprisoned.
But what Richard remarked upon is that the Iranian media had started to take note of his wife’s imprisonment. “I think in Iran we’ve become a much bigger story than we were before, and there’s an awareness that really this needs to be solved.”
Ratcliffe also received cards and letters from supporters addressed to “the pavement near to” and “the tent outside” the Iranian Embassy, according to The Times of London.
His wife is a program director at the Thomson Reuters Foundation, the charitable arm of the Reuters news agency. She was detained at Imam Khomeini Airport in April 2016 as she was preparing to return to London after her parents and introducing them to the couple’s then-22-month-old daughter, Gabriella, who has been living with the grandparents since Nazanin was jailed.
She is serving a five-year prison sentence for attempting to overthrow the Iranian government.
Earlier this year, the UK Foreign Office granted Nazanin British “diplomatic protection,” raising her case to the level of a legal dispute between Britain and Iran, rather than a simple consular issue. But this appears to have had no impact. Iranian diplomats have said they do not regard Zaghari-Ratcliffe as British since they do not recognize dual nationality.
The Iranian Embassy in London protested Richard Ratcliffe’s presence throughout the strike, claiming that he and his supporters were blocking the entrance to the building and that the presence of television cameras violated the privacy of staff.
The ambassador lodged a complaint with the British Foreign Office, saying the hunger strike was in breach of Article 22 of the Vienna Convention protecting the running of diplomatic missions, The Times of London reported. In the United States, federal law requires that protesters at an embassy stay at least 300 feet from the embassy property.