Richard Ratcliffe has reached day 20 of his hunger strike outside the foreign office, in protest at the failure of Britain to secure the release of his wife from detainment in Iran.
Yesterday Middle East minister James Cleverly held a half an hour meeting with Mr Ratcliffe in which no progress was reportedly made.
An FCDO spokesperson said the Iranian Deputy Foreign Minister was “pressed on the need for Iran to urgently release all British nationals unfairly detained in Iran, including Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, Anoosheh Ashoori and Morad Tahbaz”, adding that they “continue to work hard to secure the release of all those British nationals unfairly detained in Iran.
Ali Bagheri Kani, Iran’s hardline deputy foreign minister is on a visit to the UK to meet with Foreign Office officials ahead of the resumption of the Vienna nuclear talks later this month.
Foreign secretary Liz Truss met with her Iranian counterpart at the UN general assembly in New York City in September.
She raised the case of Mrs Zaghari-Ratcliffe, who marked the 2000th day of her arbitrary detention in the country on 23 September.
Former foreign secretary Jeremy Hunt said yesterday that the UK “should absolutely pay” its debt owed to Iran.
It is thought that the UK owes £400 million to the Iranian government due to its non-delivery of Chieftain tanks ordered by the Shah of Iran.
“It is a debt and this is a country that pays its debts,” the MP for South West Surrey argued in an interview with Sky News yesterday morning, pushing back on claims the transaction would be a ‘ransom payment’ to the theocratic regime that has detained scores of British citizens.
“There are also political considerations,” he said regarding the payment of the debt while Iran remains under US sanctions, he went on; “but given that President Obama did pay America’s debts to Iran in exactly the same situation, I think it’s unlikely that we would have the same objections from President Biden than we might have had from President Trump.”
He also acknowledged that there were “practical issues with sanctions,” but said: “those are things that you can sometimes get around, if you, for example, gave £400m worth of medicines or something like that.”
