Extract from Business Questions The Leader of the House of Commons
(Mr Jacob Rees-Mogg):...I share the right hon. Lady’s pleasure that
Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe has had her tag removed. My right hon.
Friend the Prime Minister spoke to the President of Iran and made
absolutely clear that there is no reason to hold, detain or keep
Nazanin any longer. She ought to be free to leave. As the right
hon. Lady knows, this is an issue that the Government take very
seriously and have been working on...Request free trial
Extract from Business
Questions
The Leader of the House of Commons (
):...I share the right hon. Lady’s pleasure
that Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe has had her tag
removed. My right hon. Friend the Prime Minister spoke to the
President of Iran and made absolutely clear
that there is no reason to hold, detain or keep Nazanin any longer.
She ought to be free to leave. As the right hon. Lady knows, this
is an issue that the Government take very seriously and have been
working on consistently, and we must and will continue to do
so...
(Hampstead
and Kilburn) (Lab) [V]: As Nazanin
Zaghari-Ratcliffe’s local MP, I have raised the issue of
the £400 million that the UK owes Iran with three Prime Ministers
and four Foreign Secretaries so far. In a call to the Prime
Minister yesterday, Iranian President Rouhani all
but confirmed that resolving this debt was the key to diplomatic
progress, and could help Nazanin’s case. Will the Leader of the
House finally admit that there is a clear link between the two, or
at least allow a debate in Government time to test their
arguments?
Mr Rees-Mogg: No. The hon. Lady has quite
rightly campaigned for the release of Nazanin
Zaghari-Ratcliffe, as has the shadow Leader of the House.
However, it would be quite wrong to link payments of any money to
the release of somebody who is improperly detained. Once Her
Majesty’s Government go down that route, every badly run country in
the world will hold us to ransom via our citizens; we must not do
that. We must be absolutely clear that the UK Government do not pay
for the release of hostages, whether they are held by states or by
individuals. To link these two issues would be a dangerous change
of very, very long-standing Government policy.
Extract from Commons
debate on International Women's Day
(Hampstead
and Kilburn) (Lab) [V]: Recently my four-year-old
daughter proudly declared that she wants to be a politician when
she is older, because she wants to work to make life easier for
other people. Her words came back to haunt me when I saw my
six-year-old constituent Gabriella Ratcliffe, whose life has been
anything but easy.
The story of Gabriella’s childhood is well rehearsed. She was
separated from her mother, Nazanin
Zaghari-Ratcliffe, when she was still being breastfed at
18 months. At the age of two, she had to wear a sack over her head
when visiting her mother in prison, and she celebrated her third
birthday in the waiting room at Evin prison. By the age of four,
she had forgotten how to speak English, and so lost the ability to
communicate with her father, Richard. At the age of five, she
travelled across two continents, from Iran to the UK, saying goodbye to
her mother indefinitely and promising to be brave.
I often see Gabriella on my Zoom calls with Richard, and she
once asked me if mummy would be coming home in time for Mother’s
Day—a plea from a young woman about her imprisoned mother to her
female MP felt particularly poignant on International Women’s
Day.
Yesterday it was reported that the Prime Minister and
President Rouhani had a conversation about Nazanin
Zaghari-Ratcliffe’s release, and it was heavily implied
that the £400 million debt that the UK owes to Iran was linked to my
constituent’s case. I imagined being a fly on the wall, listening
to two men at the top of their respective Governments discussing
the fate of a poor woman who had been caught as a political pawn
between the two countries, taken hostage and imprisoned for crimes
she did not commit, mentally tortured for years, all to serve a
diplomatic negotiation with an oppressive regime over issues
including a debt dating back to the 1970s and the international
arms trade.
For a lot of women we will hear about today, their tragedies
have been caused by personal or local circumstances. Gabriella’s
personal tragedy has been caused by global injustice, which has
overwhelmingly been orchestrated by men. At this moment, Nazanin’s
fate is held in the hands of men: President Rouhani, the judges
in Iran and, of course, our Prime
Minister.
I hope that Nazanin returns to the UK soon, and that she
returns to a country that is on a path to true equality between men
and women, where her daughter and my son can walk the same streets
as equals.
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