Jailed mother Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe will go on hunger strike in solidarity with a British-Australian academic who is also being held in Iran
- Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, 41, arrested in April 2016 and sentenced to five years
- British-Australian academic Kylie Moore-Gilbert held since October 2018
- Mrs Zaghari-Ratcliffe will join Ms Moore-Gilbert in a hunger strike to protest
A British-Iranian mother who was jailed for spying in Iran will go on a hunger strike in solidarity with another woman who is also being held.
Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, 41, will join British-Australian academic Kylie Moore-Gilbert in a hunger strike to protest at her being sentenced to ten years on espionage charges.
Ms Moore-Gilbert started her strike six days ago after being held in solitary confinement in Tehran since October 2018.
She is pleading to be moved from her single cell, at the minimum, according to The Guardian.
British-Iranian Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, 41, who worked for the Thomson Reuters Foundation, was arrested in April 2016
Mrs Zaghari-Ratcliffe, who worked for the Thomson Reuters Foundation, was arrested in April 2016 and sentenced to five years in prison for allegedly planning the ‘soft toppling’ of Iran’s government.
Many dual nationals in Tehran believe they are being held as political hostages.
Mrs Zaghari-Ratcliffe went on a 15-day hunger strike in June, to call attention to her plight and has now said she will undertake another before New Year’s Eve.
British-Australian academic Kylie Moore-Gilbert started her hunger strike six days ago
In July, she was moved to the mental health ward of Imam Khomeini hospital under the control of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard.
It comes as a third dual national, French-Iranian academic Fariba Adelkhah, is also on hunger strike, as the French government has summoned the Iranian ambassador over imprisonment.
Speaking about Ms Moore-Gilbert’s strike, Mrs Zaghari-Ratcliffe’s husband, Richard Ratcliffe said: ‘It gives some sense of just how desperate 16 months in solitary makes you.
‘At some point you really feel you have nothing left to get noticed, nothing left to lose.’
He said his thoughts go out to Ms Moore-Gilbert’s family and described how the Australian and British governments need to ‘step up’ before the academics are left to die.
Before Christmas, Ms Moore-Gilbert wrote to the Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison to do more to secure her release.
In the letter she described how she has been banned from any contact with her family with the exception of a three-minute phone call with her father which she said put her life at risk.
Her plight is the fifth hunger strike she has undertaken in what she describes as the ‘only means’ of making her voice heard.
A spokesman for Iran’s foreign ministry, Abbas Mousavi, said Iran would not surrender to political games or propaganda.
The Iranian government said interference from respective governments will not help their case and both academics were found guilty of espionage.
Iran does not recognise dual nationality for its citizens.