#164 Margaret Owen: On Hunger Strike for Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe
FiLiA talks to Margaret Owen, 89, who began a hunger strike on November 16, 2021, to raise awareness of the imprisonment in Iran of Iranian-British charity worker Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe.
Listen here (transcript below):
In early April 2016, Nazanin visited Iran to introduce her one-year-old daughter to her parents. She was accused by the Iranian government of being spy and “plotting to topple the government.” On November 2017, then British Foreign Secretary at the time and current Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, accused Zaghari-Ratcliffe of “training journalists” while on her trip. There is no evidence for any of the charges brought against her and she denies any wrongdoing. However, Boris Johnson’s comments were used by the Iranian government against her.
On 25 October 2021, Nazanin’s husband, Richard, started a hunger strike in front of the Foreign Office in London that went on for 21 days. Margaret Owen, along with other campaigners, is continuing the hunger strike in solidarity to keep up the pressure and the media attention on Nazanin’s case. In mid-November 2021, Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe won the ‘Courage Under Fire’ award at the Magnitsky Human Rights Awards. Her seven-year-old daughter Gabriella received the award on her behalf.
Margaret is a barrister specialising in women’s human rights and the President of Widows for Peace Through Democracy and has previously worked as an immigration and asylum lawyer, and as a consultant to various UN organisations. At every stage of her distinguished career Margaret has used her legal expertise and outstanding advocacy skills to benefit the most vulnerable worldwide. She has worked as a lawyer for the UK Immigrants Advisory Service; legally represented US Vietnam War draft avoiders; headed the Law and Policy division of the International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF); been a founder member of GAPS-UK (Gender Action on Peace and Security), and monitored trials and elections in Turkey. Margaret is adviser on women and children’s rights to the KHRP (Kurdish Human Rights Project), as well as being a Patron of Peace in Kurdistan.
Following the death of her husband in 1990, Margaret Owen became acutely aware of the plight of widows overseas, particularly in conflict and AIDS afflicted countries. She founded the first international organisations to address human rights issues in the context of widowhood, and is now the president of Widows for Peace through Democracy, which is the umbrella for many partner organisations across the world.
In 2013, Margaret received an O.B.E for her contribution to the advancement of women’s human rights, and particularly for her pioneering work on widows’ rights. She continues to be a regular participant at the UN Commission on the Status of Women and plays a key role in consulting on widowhood issues to the UN.
You can follow her on social media at @ElectionMargie and you can learn more about the Free Nazanin campaign at @FreeNazanin
Transcript
Margaret Owen In conversation with Raquel Rosario Sanchez
RR – Margaret Owen is a human rights barrister and is right now participating in a hunger strike to try to raise awareness to the human rights violation against Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe.
Nazanin is an Iranian and British citizen who has been detained in Iran since 2016. She has been accused by the Iranian government of plotting to topple the Iranian government.
Human rights campaigners around the world are insisting this is an arbitrary detention and is a political issue.
Nazanin’s husband Richard Ratcliffe has just ended a week’s long hunger strike and Margaret who is going to be speaking with us today about taking on and continuing the hunger strike to raise awareness about Nazanin and her family’s plight.
RR – Margaret, you wrote an open letter to the Guardian, it’s a brief letter. You wrote: At 89 I am on a hunger strike for Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe and you wrote – and I believe they shortened your letter. The bit that was published said:
We cannot allow Richard Ratcliffe’s ending his bravest 21-day hunger strike to be the end of the publicity ordering the government to pay it’s long owed debt so that Nazanin and the other hostages can return home.
Thus many of us across the country are on a hunger strike in his place for limited days to keep this injustice in the spotlight. I am now in my 3rd day and my 90th year. I can’t see what else I can do.
Now Margaret, today is your 4th day of your hunger strike. Could you begin by addressing what your hunger strike is about.
Why do you feel so passionately about Nazanin and her family’s plight?
MO – Well she is Nazanin, most human rights crisis, humanitarian disasters, incredible injustices all over the world, don’t have an immediate and ready solution to resolve them but this one does. It’s about repaying the debt. Why I am on hunger strike is that I visited Richard several times as he camped for 3 weeks outside the foreign office and didn’t eat for 3 weeks until he actually did get very nearly quite ill and then he finished it and I am really frightened that because he stopped his hunger strike which he had to do for the sake of his little girl, Gabriella and he promised Nazanin and his Mother and his family that he would not allow himself to get ill because that little girl needs him.
I started the hunger strike and asked people across the UK to join me, hoping we would get media coverage and to keep this appalling tragedy in the news.
There was a lot of publicity for the three weeks and when he ended it but since then there’s been other very worrying developments that should be in our newspapers, on our televisions, on our radios.
RR – What do you mean by developments?
MO – I mean particularly Boris Johnson and Liz Truss. Extraordinarily, Liz Truss is not only our foreign secretary, she is also minister for women and equalities, so she should be really taking this on. But they have been really, not just incompetent but much to blame for what is happening.
If people remember, it was Boris who, when he was foreign secretary who was responsible for pulling the noose around Nazanin’s neck, when completely wrongly he told people that she was in Iran because she was training journalists. That was completely wrong. None of us know why he said that because she was not there working at all, she went there to take her little girl to see her parents in Tehran. Then he also told, when he was foreign secretary, that we would pay back the debt, so he actually said he would.
Now, even recently he has been telling the Commons committee that there are a whole lot of reasons why we can’t pay the debt, it’s also being held at the International court at The Hague. Because the debt, which is £400,000,000 (4 hundred million) for these tanks, actually that debt occurred before the sanctions so it’s not ransom money either, it’s paying a debt.
Also, it’s not just Nazanin. There are other duel nationals in the prison in Iran and all he has got to do is pay the debt and I am disgusted with Boris and none of the Tory ministers, have even in that 3 weeks when people were coming to visit Richard as he camped outside the Foreign office, not one tory minister has been to see him. Boris could easily have walked round the corner from his extremely expensive refurbished flat, to speak to him but he has not done that.
On this hunger strike, I won’t go on until I’m ill, I’m nearly 90 so I will have to stop it on Monday or Tuesday. Trying to get the press or somebody to keep it in the spotlight because I really worry for Richard, an incredible courageous brave man, that he did this hunger strike, slept in that tent in the freezing cold for 3 weeks and nothing is happening.
Also he had a meeting with James Cleverly, one of the ministers in the foreign office, they all say – yes, we’re very sorry – but they’re not doing anything. There’s something they can do, that money can go back to Iran, he can go back as humanitarian aid, they could pack up a box. The other day he was saying he was thinking whether they could pack huge boxes with lots of medicines or humanitarian aid to Iran. That’s what the Americans did, that’s how they got their hostages back.
They got their hostages back, we should get ours back.
RR – Could you explain to our audience – How does the debt connect to Nazanin and the other hostages?
MO – They are being used as pawns. The Iranians are saying – you haven’t paid the debt – so they’re using them as hostages. Using hostages is against International law anyway. We can’t do anything about that but we know if they pay back that debt, they will be freed. What I really about, of course there are other ones, that any day now, she’s now been given another year in Evin prison. Evin prison is one of the worst prisons in the world, particularly to be a woman in. And any moment now, she’s been charged again with being a spy and so on. And any moment now she would be summoned back to spend another year in prison and we are all desperately worried about her physical and mental health if she should go back.
RR – She was sentenced in 2016 and it was a five-year sentence for allegedly plotting against the government. Does that mean it’s supposed to end next year? What do you mean she’s meant to go back?
MO – She was then charged again after she came out, she’s been given another sentence of 1 year in prison and another year before she is able to leave the country, so another 2 years.
RR – and she was only in Iran to take her little girl –
MO – To take her little girl Gabriella to meet her grandparents, that’s why she went. She was never doing any work there. In fact, she’s a charity worker. She’s not doing anything like that. This is what they did with the other duel nationals. So although this is particularly about Nazanin, it’s also about the others. There are 2 or 3 others who have to come home, whose families are in agony here and so worried about them.
I know a lot about Iran because I also worked with the National resistance of Iran, so I know what the conditions are like in the prisons. I’m fearful for her and also very fearful for Richard who has just been so amazing and patient and incredible.
In this 5 years since 2016, you can see he’s aged hugely on the strain of this. It’s a shocking thing. What’s so disgusting is that Boris Johnson is responsible for this being even worse. From the moment he said that she was there training journalists, that gave the Iranians all the fuel they needed to arrest her. He has never apologised; he hasn’t even been to see Richard.
So, what can I do? I can’t do much about what’s happening to women in Afghanistan or Iraq or all those families who are Kurds who are camping on the Polish/Belarus border but this is something we can all do.
We have to keep it in the spotlight, this government must pay. What is ironical with all the sleaze in the past two weeks, all the vast amounts of money, all those peers and tory MPs have earned, that could contribute to actually pay back the debt. This is so awful. It’s something that we owe. We owe it. One of the other excuses was – when they paid us for the tanks, that was at the time of the Shah. We’re not giving it back because it was another regime. - That doesn’t hold water at all.
In fact the International court at The Hague has said that this is a debt that must be paid back.
RR – Regardless of the debt issue, she is being held as a political prisoner with no evidence to back up the idea.
MO – there is no evidence at all. I want to say that they have the most incredible MP Tulip Siddiq and she had a debate in the House of Commons on Tuesday afternoon and at the very last moment she was told by the clerks that she mustn’t mention the debt because it was subjudice. They said you can’t talk about it because it’s already in the court case in Iran. As a lawyer I would say that seems to me rather spurious and I wish that she had asked the Speaker and then the Speaker would have decided whether she could speak about it.
This is not about me, this is about Nazanin and I can’t bear it because everybody is saying to me – aren’t you amazing on a hunger strike – No, what’s amazing is Richard and his family and his incredibly brave little girl and all we’re trying to do is and you can get FiLiA to do, the Guardian and Channel 4 should be talking about it, Newsnight. Today I sent it to everyone, even Woman’s Hour and nobody has picked it up.
RR – It’s not about you personally but it is about what is happening to a group of people including Nazanin and how campaigners such as yourself, are taking the mantle to continue shedding the light on it.
MO – Trying to take the place of Richard, to fill that space that he made for us.
RR – You mentioned that you wanted to camp like Richard, outside of these offices, with a tent and a shared blanket, the police did not allow you. Could you tell us a bit more about that?
MO – I don’t know how they did it, but you know, you can’t possibly camp outside the Foreign Office, you’d be moved away immediately, so that was impractical. What I missed doing, I didn’t have time to organise it, we need to have another big meeting of as many women, mostly they’re all in London. I thought this was very London centric in a way, all the people who came to visit everyday outside the foreign office, actually I wanted people from all over the country, Northern Ireland, Wales, Scotland to support. I think what we might have to do and I hope we can do this – and also the co-chair of the International Working Group of the UK Civil Society Women’s Alliance, so through them I hoped we could organise a big meeting outside Downing Street. I need a lot of help to do that. I’m not sure how I could get that together. I think that’s what we’ve got to do. By Tuesday I know I must stop my hunger strike because I might get ill.
RR – Can you tell us a little bit about the process of how you went about starting this hunger strike.
MO – I visited Richard several times and I also went on the last night, there was an incredible candle lit vigil and I’m tweeting a lot on twitter. I told him that we would do this. We would not let it go into the long grass and that we would keep on.
RR – What did he say to you when you spoke with him?
MO – He told me about the meeting they had with James Cleverly. He said he felt absolutely deflated by it. it was all nice and kind but nothing happened. He didn’t do anything, that was very depressing for him, Gabriella was there, a gorgeous little girl, dancing and singing. I said to him – Richard, you’re an amazing father – she looked so happy and he said – because she was so tiny when all this started, she had sort of normalised it, whereas if she had been older, she would have understood more and it would have been more traumatic – then he laughed and said - she’s always telling me what an awful father he was and she was grumbling because he hadn’t shaved for 3 weeks.
He has done absolutely brilliantly with that little girl. He promised Nazanin and his Mother and his sister and all his family that he would go on until he got ill. He is still having tests in hospital.
When he finished on Saturday and there was a big farewell for him, he went straight to hospital. He walked out but he was taken straight to hospital to be sure that none of his organs had been damaged by this very long.
I know a lot about hunger strikes because I’m also work very much on the Kurdish issues in Turkey where people are dying because they’ve gone on for 228 days. Some of my Kurdish friends have been saying to me – don’t do it – but I’m not doing it a long time, I’m not stupid and I’m not going to over burden the NHS by getting ill. So I will definitely have to stop on Tuesday. I’m already feeling a little bit dizzy but I’m drinking lots of water with lemon juice and sugar and that should keep me ok.
RR – Is it a complete hunger strike? No food?
MO – I don’t eat anything; I’m just drinking water. I had to do it because I said I would do it. In a sense I can’t stop it because I said I would do it only for a few days because none of us want to get ill, the NHS is over stretched anyway. It would be a stupid thing to do. So I just want it to be staggered so there’s always somebody somewhere hunger striking. If she hasn’t come back I’ll do it again in a months’ time.
It doesn’t work unless it’s picked up by the media and why I did it because at nearly 90 years old is perhaps more interesting because of my age.
RR – and still the media has not wanted to pick it up? Can you confirm is she under house arrest in her parents’ home in Tehran?
MO – At the moment she is still with her parents at her parent’s house in Tehran but she is waiting, they have told her she has been sentenced for another year in prison. This means she is waiting for the summons which could come any day.
RR – You have talked about how Evin prison is the worst. Can you tell us more about that?
MO – There are masses and masses of people in prison because anybody who protests the regime could be arrested and put in prison. Even when there were huge protests, they were protesting because there was no electricity, no food and all of that. All those people got arrested. They have executed more people in the last 2 years than ever since the 1979 revolution. What’s more, when they execute women, they rape them before they are executed so that they will not go to paradise. They are executing teenagers, there’s torture in prison. There are terrible prisons in Iran.
Women who are not completely covered up or have painted finger nails, they can be arrested in the street for not being completely covered up. It’s terrible place for women. It’s a terrible place for everybody. This is a terrible extreme regime that’s also exporting terrorism all over the world.
Now we’re trying to talk to Iran. I don’t know of any other case with the violations of international law or injustices like that. For example, we can’t do anything about all the political prisoners in Turkey and all the women who are getting long prison sentences and tortured in Turkey’s jails, we can’t do anything about it. Although we protest and campaign.
This Nazanin case, we can do something about it. It’s clear. We have to pay back that debt.
He (Boris) said – we were paying back that debt. Now he’s prevaricating again. This is on Boris’s shoulders, he is culpable. It’s his fault.
RR – You said you were incensed by the betrayal of this government. Do you see any possible changes in their position because Richard’s hunger strike lasted 21 days, there was significant media coverage, there were many MPs and figures in the Labour party including the leader of the opposition, Kier Starmer, who did visit Richard. Do you think the UK government might change their stance following not only Richards hunger strike but hunger strikes taken by like people like you?
MO – What was incredible, all the Labour MPs, Labour Peers, all sorts of people came, not 1 Tory minister came.
I hope so. I hope I get an interview on Channel 4. We’ve just got to use anything we can. The Labour party absolutely are pressing the government to pay that debt.
Then we have a government that is barely listening to us. That’s another conversation.
I do find that Jonathan Freedland’s article last Saturday was absolutely brilliant, through looking at what’s happening with Nazanin, it’s a lens on what is happening and the whole way this government is behaving. They look at everything from Priti Patel and how she is breaching international law, the refugee convention, the Bill they’re about to bring in, you could go on and on – when you look at Nazanin’s case, it reflects the way this government is behaving, it’s authoritarian manner.
It’s very sad for me at my age because I lived through the 2nd world war, the excitement of the Labour party victory of 1945. We had education, the NHS, the welfare state and all that now, under the Tory government, since 2010, it’s all being undone.
At that time the UK truly had a really good reputation for the respect for the rule of law and for compassion. When I think about the Kinder-transport and all the children that came in from Nazi Germany in the 1930s. We always had that reputation.
What’s more – and that’s FiLiA and your wonderful organisation – in 2010 when the coalition came to power, it was they who got rid of the Women’s National Commission. Women went to New York on the status of women, our Women’s National Commission was really admired. The Tories got rid of it.
There’s a very important International convention. The Convention of the Elimination of All forms of Discrimination against women (CEDAW) we are even breaching that. We have not domesticated it. We have the UK Civil Society Alliance. It has no statutory backing so nobody takes any notice of it.
This is really upsetting, that we’ve lost our moral compass.
Also, I just want to add, it’s just a suspicion, all these duel nationals, I wonder if there’s a tiny little glimpse of some racism here because I can’t imagine that if they were white middle class English people kept as hostages, I’m pretty sure this debt would be paid and they would be out, just like the Americans got out. So I’m a bit worried about that one.
RR – Have you ever talked with Nazanin?
MO – No, I’ve never met her. I only met Richard once when all this began. I met the wonderful brother-in-law who’s a doctor who was very involved and there all the time. I feel as though I know Richard now because I visited about 4 times.
RR – Based on your conversations with Richard and Gabriella her Brother-in-law. What is she like?
MO – You can see how absolutely beautiful she is and has had lots of interesting jobs. She’s incredibly intelligent. Lovely, we can see from her face and all the pictures of her, what a happy family they were. They got married in Winchester. She met him soon after she got here. All his family adore her. She’s really, really bright and a good person.
I have to say something else, I hope you don’t mind how outspoken I am in my old age, to deprive that little girl of her Mother for so many years, and there is Boris who we don’t even know how many children he has. He ought to know something about the needs of children. I just think it’s absolutely terrible what he’s doing. As he goes off on his lovely expensive holidays and god knows who paid for them, cracking his jokes and this terrible thing is going on that he could resolve in a minute.
RR – It brings home the injustice of the situation when you can picture her. Then her life is put on hold for something that has nothing to do with her.
You’re a human rights barrister, with an OBE for contributions to women’s human rights particularly around widow’s rights and a participant at the UN on the status of women with a focus on widow- ship at the UN.
Can you tell us a little bit about your work?
MO – I was the President and now a director of an organisation called Widows for Peace and Democracy. My husband died 31 years ago. I was teaching Commonwealth judges and one of them had a very sick baby and kept saying to me – could I help. Fortunately, I had a cottage in the country and my neighbour was the head Paediatrician at a hospital in Salisbury. They had a very sick baby that needed to get into hospital, they were Magistrates not judges, they weren’t very wealthy, they couldn’t afford Great Ormond Street. My lovely neighbour said – I will take the baby in – we invited this lady with her baby to come to London. The first thing she said before she sat down, holding her baby, she said – you mean your husband’s brother lets you stay here and keep all these things? –
I did know something about widows because I’d been head of law and policy at International Planned Parenthood and was travelling all over the world on the status of women issues.
I was on my way then as a visiting professor to the School of Public Health at the University of Los Angeles to give a masters course on Law Women and Development. That landed in my head as arrived on the plane, that’s when I saw that nobody was talking about widows. It’s the most neglected of all gender and human rights issues. Widows in so many countries, especially in conflict countries, they are right outside the protection of the law. They are subject to appalling non-state torture, often have no rights to inheritance or to own land. They are the poorest of the poor.
They carry stigma. It’s terrible to be a widow in these countries.
I started that at the 4th World Women’s Conference in Beijing and I’ve gone on and on trying to get widows onto the International agenda, the security council, the Human rights council and now we’re looking at climate change and widows will always been the ones left behind.
So that’s what I do.
I also work very much on the Kurdish issue. I’m a Patron of Peace in Kurdistan but I’m now on the arrest list for Turkey. I can’t go to Turkey anymore because I’ve been reporting on the trials, all these unfair trials.
What really upsets me with this government, Boris and Priti Patel, they call people like us, goody leftie lawyers, as if we’re trying to frustrate their policies just because we’re bolshie and actually what we’re doing is to try and protect the human rights enshrined in International law that everyone should enjoy. That’s what I do.
RR – What a fascinating life.
MO – It’s difficult because you can’t see change happening. Before that I was an Asylum and Immigration Lawyer. I suppose that was the happiest job I ever had because in those days I could win cases, go to the tribunal, sit on the green velvet sofa of the minister for immigration at the Home office and get decisions using discretional and passionate grounds and then I could close the file and had got a family together, finished the case, won it. With what I do now, there’s no winning.
But with this case about Nazanin, we can win if we all come together and somehow put that pressure on. This is something that we must win. It’s winnable.
RR – You’ve said as a lawyers you have to have a passion for the truth and a clarity of vision as well as the power of concentration. I can see all these elements you used in your legal practice you’re now channelling that.
What message do you have for our FiLiA audience?
MO – My message to the audience is thank you for listening to me, I do hope you will do all you can wherever you are, maybe through your MPs, write letters, to keep going on this issue, not let it go under the blankets, also wherever you are, that you organise your own mini hunger strike, your own protests, gatherings, marches don’t ever let this please go away. I need all of you to help me. I feel rather alone being nearly 90, alone in this house, not eating, I need all of you to do what you can and think of other ways. I couldn’t think of what else I could do, that’s why I wrote in the Guardian. What more can we do?
Through our MPs we vote for them, they’ve got to listen to us. We’ve got to keep on at this. They’ve got to keep badgering the government and ensuring this debt is paid. Keep Boris at his word, pick up what he said. You can google and find out everything that’s happened. Even the other day he said – I’m thinking of packing a big crate and packing it with humanitarian aid – he says all these things and then he never does it.
I think that’s the way – use your MP. All your clubs, all the places that you meet people, keep all of them on it. I’m wearing a badge that says – Free Nazanin. You could do lots I’m sure.
Thank you very very much, I just feel worried that even my mini hunger strike, I don’t want it to have been a waste of time.
I’m very grateful to you Raquel and to FiLiA for giving me an opportunity to talk about it, I cannot thank you enough.
RR – Final question – if you could speak right now to Nazanin, what would you say to her?
MO – I would say to her – the whole country is working, is on your side, we are all trying to support you. All the women in this country are so distressed at what you are going through. We love your husband, we love your little daughter and we all love you although we’ve never met you and admire you so much. We pray that whatever is going to happen in the next few months, just keep strong, I know how hard it is, we all know how hard it is but you will be free, it’s going to happen, so please keep faith and we love you and pray for you.
That’s what I would say.