Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe

Lord Monks Excerpts

Thursday 2nd December 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Monks (Lab)]

My Lords, I join all those who have congratulated the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Chelmsford on a tremendous maiden speech, which moved everyone in the Chamber. We all look forward to her many future contributions, and I congratulate her.

Nazanin has been a prisoner of the Iranian regime for over five long years. Depressingly, there seems to be no end in sight. So far, successive Foreign Secretaries have failed in their efforts to secure her release, with one of them—the present Prime Minister—making a delicate situation rather worse by wrongly describing Nazanin as a journalist and apparently confirming one of the Iranian regime’s trumped-up charges. That moment of British carelessness is of course no excuse for the Iranian regime’s treatment of Nazanin, but it has been used to justify that treatment in the eyes of supporters of the Iranian regime, and it was a costly error.

As many others have said in this debate, another error has been the continued delay in paying Iran our debt of £400 million for the undelivered tanks. I am under no illusions about the nature of the Iranian Government, who remain very hostile to the West in a number of ways. They are under severe sanction for, inter alia, their alleged actions in breach of the nuclear non-proliferation treaty, but there is no question that we owe Iran the money, and we should urgently find a way to pay up, as others have done and as President Obama did in 2016, as others have said. We cannot keep hiding behind the need to observe sanctions, thereby conceding the moral high ground to Iran.

I am not naive; I can see why many would not like to provide a large amount of money to this Iranian regime. Nor do I assume that if we paid our debt, the Iranian regime would necessarily release Nazanin and the other UK nationals who are arbitrarily detained. The regime is always ready to invent some new pretext or other to extend the detentions, but while we do not pay our debt, we continue to find it particularly difficult to avoid being labelled by Iran and its allies as feckless. To pay up would not be responding to a ransom demand, as others have said; it would be discharging an obligation.

The UK Government have insisted that there is no link between Nazanin’s detention and the debt. It is certainly the case that if we were to discharge our debt and negotiate with Iran, there could be no guarantees about Nazanin and the other British hostages being released, but not paying the debt is a clear barrier, and other western nations have settled their debts with Tehran and secured the release of citizens. Linkages and trade-offs, by the way, will be central to the success or otherwise of the resumed talks in Austria at the moment between Iran and the western powers, including the UK, on nuclear non-proliferation issues. The Iranians are not strangers to these diplomatic processes, and every opportunity should be taken to negotiate a way forward for Nazanin and the others. So, I join just about everybody who has spoken today to ask the Minister: when will this debt be cleared? What diplomatic processes are under way to negotiate for Nazanin and others who want and deserve a long- overdue release?