The welcome for the return of Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe was universal. Nothing should dampen the joy of seeing her family reunited. I visited her husband Richard twice during his hunger vigils -once outside the Iranian Embassy and, more recently outside the Foreign Office. He has proved a magnificent and brave campaigner, matching his wife’s courage and endurance at Evin prison in Iran.
The reality we cannot escape from however, is that Iran took Nazanin as a hostage and we have paid a ransom for her return.
The historical £400 million debt that we owed to Iran was indeed legitimate: In the nineteen seventies the Shah of Iran ordered and paid for UK tanks for his army. They were never delivered because the Iranian Revolution brought to power a regime that we could not possibly of have justified arming. That regime, in breach of all international standards and law, took 52 US diplomats hostage. Since when, international financial sanctions, in one form or another, have prevented the settlement of the debt we owed to Iran.
The secret terms of the treaty we signed, we are assured, prevent the £400 million being spent on any of Iran’s current military adventures in Syria, support for the Houthis in Yemen, Hezbollah in Lebanon or any of its other sponsorship of terrorism. On the contrary, it must be spent on humanitarian objectives. This fig leaf, the exact terms of which we are prevented from knowing, is our comfort blanket, reassuring us that we really didn’t pay a ransom after all; No, we just settled an historic debt that we genuinely owed and that we’ve done the just and honourable thing.
Notwithstanding my joy for the return of Nazanin, I cannot be alone in believing that Iran has secured what it set out to achieve when it took her hostage in the first place.
A precedent has been set and the world is a more dangerous place as a consequence.
Anyone who travels to jurisdictions beyond the ‘rule-of-law’ -as we understand that term in western liberal democracy, places themselves at huge risk.