The families of two dual-nationals jailed in Iran are calling on the UK Government to do more to secure their release.
Richard Ratcliffe and Kamran Foroughi will hand in petitions to Downing Street and the Foreign Office on Monday on behalf of Mr Ratcliffe’s wife Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe and Mr Foroughi’s father Kamal Foroughi.
Charity worker Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe was sentenced to five years in prison last month following a conviction on unspecified “national security-related“ offences following a trial before a Revolutionary Court in the capital Tehran.
The 37-year-old from Hampstead, north-west London, was originally arrested at Tehran Airport on April 3 along with her then 22-month-old daughter Gabriella.
On Monday, Mr Ratcliffe and Mr Foroughi will take a 72,000-signature Amnesty petition to the Foreign Office calling on Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson to prioritise Ms Zaghari-Ratcliffe’s case as well as that of fellow UK-Iranian dual-national Kamal Foroughi.
Mr Foroughi, a 77-year-old oil and gas company consultant, is serving his sixth year of an eight-year jail sentence after being convicted of espionage and possessing alcohol.
He was originally detained in May 2011 and under Iranian law has long been eligible for conditional release after serving more than a third of his sentence.
Mr Foroughi will have spent exactly 2,000 days behind bars on Monday, and his son and supporters will also be handing in a Change.org petition to Downing Street calling on Theresa May to act on the case.
Amnesty International UK’s Individuals At Risk campaign manager Kathy Voss said: “There’s been a lot of talk recently about ’thawing relations’ between the UK and Iran, but these two cases lend the lie to that.
“It looks very much like Nazanin and Kamal are being treated like pawns by the Iranian authorities and we’d like to see the UK seriously raising its game over securing proper justice for these British nationals.
“Boris Johnson needs to make sure these two cases are right near the top of his in-tray. We can’t let this drop.”