Johnson claims progress over Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliff after Tehran visit

Boris Johnson has said his plea to the Iranians to release British dual nationals such as Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe had been “received and understood”, but it was too early to be confident of whether his call for her release on humanitarian grounds would be met.

The UK foreign secretary said he hoped the presence of Zaghari-Ratcliffe’s three-year-old daughter in Tehran awaiting her mother’s release, would be uppermost in the Iranian’s minds.

Reporting back to the House of Commons on his visit to senior Iranian leaders, including the president, Hassan Rouhani, Johnson offered a shift in tone, saying Iran had a legitimate role in resolving the civil war in Yemen. He also implied Saudi Arabia ran the risk of being judged by history as using starvation as weapon of war.

Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe is a 38-year-old Iranian-British dual national who has been jailed in Iran since April 2016. She has been accused of attempting to orchestrate a “soft overthrow” of the Islamic Republic. She and her three-year-old daughter, Gabriella, were about to return to the UK from Iran after a family visit when she was arrested. Since then, she has spent most of her time in Evin prison in Tehran, separated from her daughter.

Zaghari-Ratcliffe worked for BBC Media Action between February 2009 and October 2010 before moving to Thomson Reuters Foundation, the news agency’s charitable arm, as a project manager. Her family has always said that she was in Iran on holiday.

Johnson said had raised the plight of UK dual nationals in all his meetings, adding that those talks had been worthwhile, but he did not wish to raise false hopes about any individual release.

Zaghari-Ratcliffe has been in prison for nearly two years after being sentenced for espionage. Her fate became entwined with Johnson’s political career when last month he said wrongly she had been in Tehran to train journalists.

An Iranian foreign ministry spokesman said on Monday that the ministry was going to follow up her case on humanitarian grounds, but stressed she had been found guilty by the judiciary.

Insisting it was not in the interest of her release to give a running commentary, Johnson said: “The Iranians had been clear to me that none of my remarks in any context had any bearing on any judicial proceedings in any UK consular case.”

He disclosed that he had not sought to meet Zaghari-Ratcliffe personally since the Iranian government does not recognise dual nationality and therefore would not have granted him access. But he effectively confirmed he had met with her family in private.

In a broader shift of political tone that is likely to be warmly welcomed in Tehran, he said peace in Yemen required engagement with Iran, adding there was no military solution to the civil war.

He appeared to warn Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates that history may judge them to have sought victory in Yemen through starvation. The Saudi coalition has imposed a blockade on Yemeni ports held by Houthi rebel forces, such as Hodeydah, in response to a missile fired at Riyadh airport last month.

Huge international pressure has led to the partial lifting of the blockade on humanitarian aid, but not commercial aid, leaving tens of thousands facing starvation and having to drink impure water.

Johnson met UAE and Saudi leaders in Abu Dhabi alongside US representatives on Sunday after his Tehran visit to discuss the war in Yemen.

He said: “What I said to our friends in the region, that is the risk we are running - that ... people will deem that starvation has been used as as instrument for the prosecution of a war. That is not something that anybody wants to see, least of all the coalition forces.”

Johnson stressed the Saudis had a legitimate role in defending their country, adding that in some feisty meetings he had repeatedly pressed the Iranians to reveal whether they had supplied the missile that had been fired on Riyadh by the Houthis.

But he said the Iranian presence in Yemen was increasing as a result of the war, not diminishing.