Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe talks to Emma Barnett

Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe talks for the first time to Emma Barnett for this special Woman’s Hour programme.

In this exclusive interview she reveals the full story of her imprisonment in Iran. Nazanin explains how she survived solitary confinement, how the love of her daughter kept her alive and what Prime Minster Boris Johnson told her about the real reason for her imprisonment.

Nazanin was arrested in April 2016 after visiting her parents in Iran with her 21 month-old daughter Gabriella, on her way back to Britain. For the next six years the charity project manager was detained by the Iranian regime.

She was sentenced to five years for plotting to overthrow the Iranian Government, and then in 2021, sentenced to another year for propaganda against Iran. Nazanin has always refuted those allegations as strongly as she could, stressing that she was in Iran on holiday visiting her family.

Her husband Richard Ratcliffe mounted a tireless campaign to free his wife, including twice going on hunger strike. In March 2020, as Covid took hold in Iran, Nazanin was temporarily released to her parents’ home under house in Tehran.

On 17 March this year, she was finally allowed to come home and be reunited with her husband and daughter. Her release, along with fellow British-Iranian national Anoosheh Ashoori, came after negotiations and diplomatic efforts that had intensified in the preceding months.

At the same time the UK Government paid a £400 million debt to Iran dating back to the 1970s although both governments have said the two issues should not be linked.

CREDITS Presenter Emma Barnett Producer Woman’s Hour Sarah Crawley Producer Director John O’Rourke Executive Producer Tanya Hudson Executive Editor Woman’s Hour Karen Dalziel