UK – Independent, June 04, 2025
While Richard was sitting hungry and cold on the London pavement, he had a visit from Keir Starmer, then leader of the opposition. Days later, he called Nazanin – on house arrest in Tehran – and committed to do what he could to help get her home, recall Richard Ratcliffe and Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe.
The pain of being separated from your child by prison walls is almost impossible to convey. During our family’s six year ordeal, the cruelty of Nazanin being kept apart from our daughter Gabriella by the capricious machinery of Iran’s “justice” system often threatened to overwhelm us.
And now our hearts are breaking to see our dear friend Laila Soueif on the edge of life and death, in an attempt to save her eldest child Alaa Abd el-Fattah, a brave and principled British-Egyptian writer who has done nothing to deserve the years he has spent behind bars separated from his mother, young child and sisters.
Like Nazanin, Alaa is imprisoned unlawfully after a sham legal process, a fact attested to by United Nations experts. Like Nazanin, his family’s fate hangs increasingly on the efforts of the British government, which has the means to resolve the case but was far too slow off the mark in responding to an intolerable injustice – and treated it as merely a diplomatic inconvenience.
After seeing the end of his most recent five year sentence – for sharing a Facebook post about torture – pass in September without his release and without any acknowledgment from the British government, Laila embarked on a hunger strike in protest. She is still on that hunger strike, nearly nine months later. Only now, she is in a central London hospital bed.
