Foreign Affairs committee  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 prison

Foreign Affairs committee  Yes is the honest answer, and it varies over time. Broadly, in our experience, when someone is held in solitary, we have no contact for the first couple of months, which is the really live interrogation period. Thereafter, Nazanin was allowed to call me, which would typically be

Foreign Affairs committee  Not facts, but yes, there are obviously quite a few Baha'í women in the cells with Nazanin, some really inspiring and uplifting people. There were a number of Baha'í women released just recently. They were very lovely, calming influences. The ward is a bit more fractious now, sin

Foreign Affairs committee  Thank you. It's a good question. My sense of it is that they're not actually asking for something new. We were very surprised by the prisoner swap offer. The prisoner swap offer was made in the States and was specifically to an American audience, invoking Nazanin's name, but the

Foreign Affairs committee  Yes is the short answer. The Raoul Wallenberg Centre has produced a report with a list of names. I think some of those names are directly connected to Nazanin's case and the cases of others. For some of the names, I can't say hand on heart that they're directly connected to Nazan

Foreign Affairs committee  You're getting me into political hot water here. It would have been on the televisions around the world, so you may be partly familiar with the story. In short, the then foreign secretary came before the U.K. foreign affairs committee in the House of Commons and gave evidence on

Foreign Affairs committee  It's a fair question that all public figures have to think through. I think that in a context in which I just talked about, Magnitsky sanctions, you're probably quite safe in terms of where the resentment is going to come. He took a lot of political flack domestically. My sense

Foreign Affairs committee  Across the piece of all the different families, we take different views. I'm definitely at the loud and clear end of things. There are a couple of things I perhaps wouldn't do, but broadly I think the truth is on our side and that we should be straightforward. There are some fa

Foreign Affairs committee  —and they're being told that by the Iranian authorities, and sometimes they're being told that by their own foreign service, saying that this is a delicate issue and let's just go—

Foreign Affairs committee  Yes, we're all muddling our way through.

Foreign Affairs committee  In terms of those who were part of this UN submission—that's active families co-operating—there are about 15. Not all of them were on the record there. There are some who are named authors, and some who are cases, and then there are some who were involved but wouldn't want to h

Foreign Affairs committee  The majority would be from the States, from the U.K., a couple from Canada, and from Europe—those would be from Austria, Sweden and the Netherlands—and then a couple of others.

Foreign Affairs committee  I think that's a really important thing to happen. There is an element of divide and rule, if I'm honest, in the way Iran has played it through bilateral deals.

Foreign Affairs committee  Divide and rule, I mean in the way Iran has played it through individual bilateral deals, in secret.

Foreign Affairs committee  There is a sensitivity to this. Let us say you're the British foreign office. You have some cases like us who want to be public and you have some cases that want to be private, and where you position yourself is tricky. I think, though, that those of us who are public are certain