-There's a whole process of keeping someone
completely disoriented, completely isolated,
completely at the power of their interrogators.
Even now, she'll get nightmares and panic attacks.
Nazanin went to Iran for a family holiday with Gabriella,
who was then one and three quarters.
It was Iranian New Year at the time
and she'd been every year
to partly just be part of that celebration
and all the family comes together,
and then to go round and join in the different family meals
and show off her daughter being that bit bigger.
♪ The babies on the bus go ♪
♪ Wah, wah, wah! ♪
♪ The babies on the bus go wah, wah, wah! ♪
♪ All day long ♪
-Really just a time to all be together.
Lovely two weeks.
And then, yeah, came back at the end of it
and a completely different experience.
Nazanin was arrested at the airport and footage
has since been released by the Revolutionary Guard.
She was told there was a problem with her passport
and she was gonna be taken away.
Gabriella was given back to her grandparents,
who were there to see off Nazanin and Gabriella.
And she disappeared.
I have no doubt that Nazanin is a hostage
and I think that's been clear since June of 2016,
when we first got the message that she was being held to
encourage the British government to make the agreement.
I've been very critical of the way
in which the UK government has handled Nazanin's case.
They have raised their case.
They've asked nicely and they've been asking nicely
for a long time and still do ask nicely.
But it took them more than two years to acknowledge
any violation of Nazanin's rights.
We had a UN ruling from the UN Working Group on Arbitrary
Detention to say this was an illegal case
ands he should be released immediately.
And we had a second court case open
that was blamed on the foreign secretary of the time.
-Boris Johnson called you yesterday.
-He did.
-First time you've had any contact with him.
-Yeah, yeah. -Did he apologize?
-He was sorry for what Nazanin was going
through and for her suffering
and he said that all of the country was behind her.
-Well, we're all sorry about that,
but did he apologize for making it immeasurably worse.
-He didn't make that connection.
In November 2017, Boris Johnson spoke in Parliament
and said that Nazanin had been training journalists
while she was in Iran.
That was wrong.
But that was used the next, two days later,
to justify a second court case against Nazanin
and was used in the Iranian media, day after day,
to justify the fact that a truth
had been revealed by the secret government.
-It was my mistake. I should've been clearer.
I apologize for the distress.
I apologize for the distress and anguish that has been caused
to Mrs Zaghari-Ratcliffe and her family.
-And it took our story from being a fairly minor story
in British politics to becoming front-pagers for a couple weeks.
It caused Boris Johnson to go to Tehran
to try and sort out our case and brief the press
that he was going to try and resolve the debt.
Unfortunately, once he did go to Iran,
he didn't solve the debt
and then, that had consequences for us all.
The UK's instinctive approach to solving cases like this
is to keep them very quiet, to keep them all separate.
And there are a number of British families
who are going through this situation.
The Foreign Office will never have a meeting
with all of us together.
The government should've been standing up very clearly,
very assertively, and saying, "Back off.
You don't treat one of our citizens in this way".
Not trying to sign new oil deals,
not trying to upgrade the embassy,
not trying to improve relations,
but to have it clear that red lines matter
and things like this are unacceptable.
There needs to be a clear mechanism
that the UN uses to challenge it
and people need to be called out.
What you've had with the Revolutionary Guard
is developing this as a tactic that they've gotten away with.
They've not done it consistently for 40 years,
but they've done it on and off for 40 years
and they're doing it more and more.
State hostage taking is not acceptable,
and this just grows and becomes something that other countries
are watching and are learning as a good,
you know, asymmetric tactic to use.
It's something that creates an increasing danger for us all.
It took us a number of weeks
before it was clear who'd got her
and where she was being held.
She was being kept in a solitary room,
no natural light, light on all the time.
There were three blankets: one to use as a pillow,
one as a mattress, and one to cover herself.
No chance of washing, so she was in the same clothes for 38 days.
Until she was released from solitary
and she was released for a brief period.
She wasn't able to stand up properly and it took her,
you know, being made to walk with people
helping her every day for a number of minutes
to gradually be able to walk again
and to reach out and to have human contact.
They obviously put pressure on her, said,
"Listen, your husband has abandoned you
and he's taking your daughter away
and we've got photographs of him with other women".
-Is there anything that would let you believe
that your wife's job,
her charitable function within Thomson-Reuters Foundation,
is there anything that would let you think that,
perhaps, she veered off-course and, perhaps,
was doing something outside of the remit of her job?
-No. So, I mean, so she works
in Morocco and Burma and sub-Saharan Africa.
I can't see how that, in any way,
is a national security risk for the state of Iran.
She's based in London.
She worked on different projects.
It was an administrative role, so her job would be
to write reports for donors
and to book journalists to go and do stuff.
Because she always wanted to go back to Iran,
she made sure there was no work connection there.
When Nazanin was arrested,
Gabriella was one and three quarters
and was still occasionally being breast-fed,
so it was a deep shock.
She would just go to the door, wanting to get Mummy.
She would go and point at the wedding photo of us
and point at Mummy and say, "Want to see Mummy".
And she would wake up screaming every night,
calling out for Mummy.
On 10th of October, 2019,
Gabriella was allowed to leave Iran
and came back to the UK,
came back a, sort of, a shy, daunted five-year old,
but, bless her, has coped remarkably well.
She can't speak English anymore because it's been so long,
and, yeah, she's -- she's adapted day by day.
One of the things we noticed today when were on the Tube is,
Gabriella kept pointing out the cameras
and kept asking her uncle and me,
Are they watching us?
♪ The daddies on the bus go sss, sss, sss! ♪
♪ Sss, sss, sss! Sss, sss, sss! ♪
♪ Daddies on the bus go sss, sss, sss! ♪
♪ All day long ♪
-What Nazanin has gone through is spectacularly unfair
and spectacularly cruel.
She is really up-and-down, really depressed,
really angry with herself, angry that she can't do anything,
angry that she can't get herself out of it.
She's at this point, now,
where she doesn't dare hope for anything.
This can't go on. She can't cope much longer.
She's trying to be as clear as possible that she can't cope
and, certainly, when she did the hunger strike,
and that's the third hunger strike she's now done,
what she was saying is, "I can't cope anymore".
I now have very sober conversations
with the British government.
Said, "Listen, you're making choices here.
There are consequences to us because of your choices.
Just be aware that you do not have the luxury of time".
But both governments can sit here playing this game of poker
with each other, playing this game of chess with each other.
We are the ones paying the price for it.
Not just us -- there are other families paying the price.
But it's just ordinary people who are being allowed
to have their lives waste away while this goes on.
And there is a real cost.