Jack Straw, ex-British foreign secretary, told Iran International Wednesday that Britain should pay £400 million owed Iran since 1971 and linked to Iran's detention of a dual national.
Straw said the only possible obstacle to paying the debt was potential United States sanctions, which threaten punitive action against any third party dealing with Iran’s financial sector. But Straw suggested this was unlikely given past US behavior in similar circumstances.
“When there was previously a Democrat [Party] government in power in Washington, and John Kerry was the secretary of state, he arranged for about $2 billion to be paid to the Iranian government – [money] the US owed - the money was put on a plane,” Straw said. “The United States are not going to make a fuss about us paying a debt, if necessary in a similar way.”
On the same day, in January 2016, that the US flew to Tehran $1.7 billion it owed Iran, the Iranian authorities released four Americans, including Jason Rezaian, an Iranian-American journalist arrested in July 2014. Washington also freed seven Iranians held over alleged sanctions violations.
Straw said he was convinced that “from time to time the Islamic Republic of Iran has engaged in what amounts to hostage taking” and that while he could not be certain, he assumed this was the case with Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe detained in Iran since 2016.
Straw has been a proponent of improving ties with Iran, arguing that the regime in Tehran is not the revolutionary government of 40 years ago and diplomacy can work to change its policies.
But the former foreign secretary insisted that, nonetheless, the money was owed: “If we pay, it will not create any further difficulties for Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe and may very well ease her circumstances of release.”
International arbitration ruled in 2001 that London should repay money given by Iran for military hardware that was never delivered.
‘Complicated’ relations
Straw noted that Britain’s relationship with Iran was “complicated,” and had been so before the 1979 Revolution. While he said Britain had on occasions handled Zeghari-Ratcliffe’s case poorly – he cited Boris Johnson’s 2017 statement to a parliamentary committee that she was in Iran training journalists – the situation needed “very careful diplomacy” and that “shouting at them, or as some people have said, breaking off diplomatic relations, is going to get us absolutely nowhere.”
Straw said he shared the frustration of Richard Ratcliffe, who is in hospital for tests after a 21-day hunger strike outside the British foreign office in London to draw attention to the plight of his wife.
The issue of paying the £400 million ($540 million) debt is controversial in British politics, with Ratcliffe alleging his wife is forbidden from leaving Iran, effectively held ‘hostage,’ to pressure London to pay.
Taking ‘hostages’
While Straw has earlier argued that Britain should pay, others, including many within the ruling Conservative Party, oppose the move, arguing it would encourage Iran to take other hostages. An ex-detainee in Iran, theAustralian-British academic Kylie Moore-Gilbert, said Wednesday that the British government should repay the £400 million only in the form of “humanitarian aid.”
In a debate Tuesday in the British parliament Jeremy Hunt, a former Conservative foreign minister, said the UK should immediately pay “if necessary, by getting an RAF [British air force] plane to fly gold to Tehran.”
Zaghari-Ratcliffe, a project manager for Thomson Reuters Foundation, was arrested in 2016, convicted without a fair trial of working to overthrow the government and sentenced to five years jail. After being paroled early in 2020, she was charged with new offences and has been refused permission to leave the country. Other British citizens held in Iran are dual-nationals Anoosheh Ashoori, a businessman, and labor activist Mehran Raoof.
The trial of Hamid Noury (Nouri), ex-judicial official, over alleged involvement in Iran’s 1988 prison executions has begun hearings in Albania with testimony on the part played by President Ebrahim Raisi.
The sessions, which started August 10 in Stockholm, moved to Albania to question members of the opposition Mujahedin-e Khalq (MEK), who were relocated by the United States after the post-2003 government in Baghdad objected to the presence in Iraq of the armed group, which had been allied to Saddam Hussein.
Six judges, two prosecutors, and the lawyer of 60-year-old Noury all travelled to Duress, Albania. Noury, who was arrested in Sweden in November 2019, is being tried there under a principle of universal jurisdiction and attended Wednesday’s sessions through videoconferencing.
Akbar Samadi, an MEK member, told the court he had been arrested in 1981, aged 14, when a sympathizer of the group. By summer 1988, Samadi had been in prison for seven years serving a ten-year sentence, and Raisi was Tehran deputy prosecutor.
"Raisi … took me to an empty room,” Samadi told the court. “He ordered me to denounce armed uprising. I told him I was shorter than a G-3 battle rifle [a German-made automatic weapon] when I was arrested…Then Raisi told me to denounce a Kurdish party, the Komala, and I protested that I was neither a Kurd nor belonged to the Komala. He got angry and threw me out of the room and sent me to the death corridor.”
Calling out names
Samadi said after being pressed by a commission of interrogators on four occasions he agreed to a televised interview to denounce the MEK. He also alleged that Noury, known as Hamid Abbasi to prisoners, was responsible for calling out victims' names and taking them to be executed.
In his first press conference as president-elect, on June 21, Raisi replied to questions about the 1988 executions that those accusing him were “guilty themselves” and that foreign powers were harboring "17,000 murderers" who had killed Iranian officials, a reference to MEK bombings and other attacks killing Iranian officials and others.
Noury, the only former Iranian official to face trial for the 1988 executions, has denied all allegations and claims he was on paternity leave at the time.
MEK members were the main victims of the 1988 prison executions, with a lower number of executions of leftists. The MEK has claimed 30,000 members died, and in 2019 launched a booklet Crimes Against Humanity naming 5,000.
In 2016, nearly 30 years after the massacres and seven years after his death, the family of Hossein-Ali Montazeri published an audiotape from a meeting with senior judges in which Montazeri condemned the executions. Montazeri, who had been removed as designated successor of then Supreme Leader Ruhollah Khomeini after protesting the executions, said between 2,800 and 3,800 MEK were killed.
Raisi’s election as president in June sparked interest in his role in the executions. Agnes Callamard, secretary general of Amnesty International, immediately demanded that the United Nations Human Rights Council investigate him for crimes against humanity.