To read Richard Ratcliffe’s long investigative article about the purported reasons behind his wife’s situation, one can sense the burning sense of injustice and betrayal he feels.
Not only has his wife been arbitrarily and unlawfully kept as prisoner, for years, by one of the world’s most capricious systems of hostage-taking – by a nominally legitimate state – he has also suffered the dual humiliation of being strung along by two governments: Iran’s, and ours.
The foreign secretary said last week that the treatment Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe has suffered in Iran ‘amounts to torture‘. He is right. Years of detention for no reason is an act intended to humiliate and hurt. It means suffering. And with each iteration in what Zaghari-Ratcliffe has suffered, each new return to prison after a mirage of freedom or relaxation, the torturer emerges from the judge, the jailor, and the bureaucrat.
Read the rest of this piece at The Critic.
James Snell 