Thank you, Chair. I'm honoured to present to this committee. I'm honoured to be amongst such fellow panellists. I think it's a really important initiative.
I am here to bring these issues a bit closer to home, and to talk about the issue of foreign and dual nationals held prisoner in Iran, including Canadian citizens, and to talk about what the committee and Canada can do for those people.
As the chair said, my name is Richard Ratcliffe. I'm the husband of Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, a British Iranian charity worker who is currently being held in Evin prison in Iran.
Nazanin's story, as the chair alluded to, started three years ago. She was arrested when on holiday. She was on a family holiday for Iranian new year with our 21-month-old daughter. She was arrested. Our daughter's passport was confiscated. She was put into solitary confinement and sent to an unknown location.
Later on she was accused in the Iranian media of espionage and was convicted for five years on secret charges at a secret trial. At her trial, she was not allowed to speak.
Just before she became eligible for parole, a second court case was opened against her formally blocking her eligibility for parole. This was famously blamed on the words of the then U.K. foreign secretary, Boris Johnson, who had mistakenly said that she was training journalists at the time. That was seized upon by the Iranian judiciary to justify it.
That second court case has been opened and closed periodically. Two days ago it was reopened by the judiciary spokesperson, and we await its verdict.
In reality, Nazanin is being held as diplomatic leverage by the Iranian authorities in a dispute between the U.K. and Iran over some unpaid monies that the U.K. owes Iran over an old arms debt. Most of the strange events in our case, and there have been many, can be related to the dynamics of that dispute. The judiciary spokesperson's words this week make sense because that dispute is back in court again in London later this month.
My point today is not to talk directly about Nazanin's case, but more to point out that Nazanin is not the only one being held. She is one of a number of dual and foreign nationals held in Iran on arbitrary charges. There are over 30 cases since 2014 that are known about. There are obviously others that aren't known because many families choose to keep quiet.
They include a number of current Canadian prisoners. Nazanin used to be a cellmate of a lady called Professor Homa Hoodfar, who has happily been released. Currently, there is a gentleman called Saeed Malekpour who has been in Evin prison for 11 years. As my fellow panellist just mentioned, Kavous Seyed-Emami was held and died in mysterious circumstances in Evin last year. His wife, Maryam Mombeini, is currently being held in Iran and had a national security case opened against her following his death.
Human Rights Watch has documented a systematic targeting of foreign and dual nationals by the Iranian security services, particularly those with links to the outside world, whether they are academics, charity workers, IT workers, or journalists in some cases. They are often framed with opaque national security cases used to justify internal control and then used for external bargaining with the country of their other passport.
A number of people have been picked up while on holiday, some of them very old and some of them young. In Nazanin's case, she was still breastfeeding when she was taken.
Last month a number of the families got together and produced a submission to the UN through the universal periodic review process, which was really their attempt to come together and talk in a common voice.
For me, it was striking just how many common patterns there were in these cases: the secret trials, the refusal of a lawyer, the use of solitary confinement to extract confessions, keeping prisoners incommunicado and away from their families, secluding them from any consular access, the denial of medical treatment as a tool of pressure. There have been quite a few heart attacks, particularly with the older men, and a need for heart surgery; very extensive back problems for many people from sleeping on the floor for many months; almost consistent depression; and often a number of hunger strikes to get access to medical attention. Also, there have been the broadcast of smears on the Iranian state TV; taking private documents and making up stories; an airing of confessions that were extracted while in solitary, often false confessions and often very embittering for the families afterwards; of course, raids on family homes and the taking of family assets; and the use of threats to maintain surveillance.
lt is a nasty business—and it is a business. Two weeks ago foreign minister Zarif was in New York. He was marketing the idea of a prisoner swap. He raised Nazanin's name in relation to it, and then once he had the media's attention, he took the offer away and made it clear that there were different requirements and a different deal was needed for Nazanin.
My agenda here today is to say that there is a protection gap for all of these people that are held in this way. This is a hostage crisis. We do need Canada's help, among other countries, to protect its own citizens and the citizens of other like-minded states and to really enforce some kind of accountability for this kind of hostage-taking.
There is a lack of protection partly because there is a failure to recognize quite what is going on and by treating these individual cases as sort of random and unfair, rather than effectively as an encroaching form of diplomacy.
Also, Iran is special in many ways, but it is worth noting that they're the only country that takes foreign citizens and uses them for leverage. Canada is experiencing that with China currently.
The erosion, it seems to me, of previous norms against state hostage-taking creates more than a protection gap for individual citizens. lt risks allowing a new middle ages of international law, and it is something that should be taken very seriously by all foreign countries and parliaments around the world.
The common frustration for us and the complaint you'll hear from Canadians and the Brits is that not enough is done for our individual families and that our cases can be like flotsam on the seas of bigger political concerns whether they be a nuclear deal or whatever.
1 think for me the issue is one of approach and accountability. That is why this week is very important. I think after three years there needs to be a very clear calling out of hostage-taking and I think Canada can play an important role in this. It has done that in other human rights areas.
There are obviously two specific areas that we are talking about. One is the work at the UN, where Canada plays a very important role with Iran and human rights resolution. It is the leading voice in the universal periodic review process. I think we will be pushing the U.K. to do an Arria-formula meeting at the Security Council. This is not just an issue of human rights. This is also an issue of international peace and security as a norm that's been eroded.
Also—and it's a topic that is part of this seminar—there are the Magnitsky sanctions and the idea of sanctions that are focused on individuals for individual accountability, not some sort of blunt tool of collective punishment, but that are targeted very clearly on the perpetrators of clear abuses.
Speaking personally, rather than on behalf of all the families, I think it's really important to raise the cost of hostage-taking in any way that can be done by Canada, like other like-minded states. In reality, it needs international coordination. We are all for resonance, for effectiveness across jurisdictions. It is often the case in individual cases, and Canada will experience it as well, that you can feel exposed by a lack of solidarity. Actually, it is really important that we are all stronger together.
I think three years have taught me that systematic abuses are rarely solved by euphemisms and not acknowledging what is going on, but through shared values and through accountability for a shared world. The world doesn't have to be this way.
If I have time, I'd like to end with a couple of words from Nazanin, just from what what she told me earlier on, that ordinary people are always at the centre of human rights issues. She wrote a letter on the anniversary of her arrest, stating:
Do you remember the time that I was proud of my country and used to tell your family and friends about every little detail? Do you remember that I used to insist on going to Iran each year to spend Nowrouz? I will never ask you that again. This isn't what I was trying to teach about my country to you and your family.
The first nine months of last year were spent because of an uncommitted crime, in various solitary cells. Many days during which I believed that I would never see you again. Every day and every second I would submerge more and more in an ocean of doubt, fear, threat, loneliness and more than anything mistrust.
No one would see me scream for my two year old daughter who wasn't in my arms.
But hold my hands, let us finish this chapter. We shall overcome this pain. Today freedom has got one day doser.
Thank you, all, for being here today.
