British officials did not demand that Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe sign a forced confession before leaving Iran, but advised that Iranians would not allow her to leave unless she did so, the British East Minister said. Media, Amanda Milling, to MPs.
British officials also warned that it was a common Iranian practice for released detainees to sign these documents, Milling said.
Zaghari-Ratcliffe has claimed that the Foreign Ministry was complicit in forcing her to sign a confession in front of the television cameras after six years had passed by refusing to admit she was guilty. In a letter from her lawyers, human rights group Redress says she fears the confession will be used against her and other dual-national detainees detained in Iran.
On Tuesday in the House of Commons, Milling admitted that officials from the UK Foreign Office were present at the signing of Zaghari-Ratcliffe’s forced confession, but simply conveyed to him the message of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) that he had to sign it.
Milling said: “Given the situation, Iran has put Nazanin [in] at the airport made the decision to sign the document. No British officer forced her to do so. Iran has a practice of insisting that detainees sign documents before being released. “
Milling has repeatedly said that UK officials did not force Zaghari-Ratcliffe, a dual British-Iranian national, to sign the document, but he was careful to avoid saying if officials advised him to do so.
Nor did she respond if Foreign Secretary Liz Truss knew in advance the preconditions for her departure. Similarly, he dodged the question of whether the IRGC would be removed from the list of foreign terrorist organizations as part of a nuclear deal with Iran.
Milling was answering an urgent question to the Commons by Zaghari-Ratcliffe MP Tulip Siddiq.
Siddiq told lawmakers: “For days before his release, the Iranian Revolutionary Guard had tried to get Nazanin to write and sign a document listing the crimes of which he was wrongly accused, admitting his guilt, apologizing and promising not to At Tehran airport on March 16, the day he was finally allowed to fly back to the United Kingdom, Iran again asked him to do so, but instead broke down. the paper.
“It was only when a UK official told her that she had to sign it if she was going to board the plane that was waiting for her to take her home, that she finally gave in and gave Iran the Nazanin returned home, but the toll this meant for my voter after six years of detention is unimaginable and unacceptable.
“She is traumatized and afraid of the consequences for her future, her family and other British citizens are still being held hostage in Iran.”
Siddiq said it was “part of a systematic failure to respond to the torture of British citizens by foreign governments and hold them accountable.”
Zaghari-Ratcliffe, in a BBC interview, confirmed that he had told the Prime Minister at a meeting in Downing Street that he had lived in the shadow of his misrepresentation to parliamentarians in 2017 that he had visited Iran to form journalists in 2016.
She said: “For about a year and a half, I was trying to say, ‘Look, I was on vacation … I came with a baby with a suitcase full of diapers …
“But when he made that comment, the Revolutionary Guards every time after that … they said, ‘You’ve been hiding information from us. We know you’re a spy. We know what you were doing, even your prime minister mentioned it.
“So I lived under the shadow of his comment psychologically and emotionally for the next four and a half years after that day.”
He said there was an old Persian saying, “Maybe you can get out of jail, but prison will never leave you and I will have to accept it.”