Women around the world will fast for 24 hours in a bid to pressure the UK government to secure the release of Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe from detention in Iran.
Campaign FiliA – a volunteer women-led organization working for women’s liberation – comes on the heels of a 21-day hunger strike by Nazanin’s husband Richard Ratcliffe, which lasted at the Foreign Office in London until mid-November.
Photos of all participants in the fast, which begins on Monday, will be published day after day on the group’s website, as an expression of solidarity. Lisa Marie Taylor, chief executive of FiLiA, said women from the UK, India, Morocco and Iran have already registered to participate.
“Richard made it clear that he didn’t want people to look bad,” he said. “So we thought we could organize a one-day-fasting series to keep pressure on the government and show Nazanin’s support for women in the UK and around the world.”
Zaghari-Ratcliffe went on a 15-day hunger strike in June 2019. Her husband’s strike this year in the fall, the second in her name, was prompted by fears that she was about to return to a prison in Tehran, the capital of Iran for another year.
The humanitarian worker, who has already spent five years in prison in Iran for espionage, which she has always denied, recently lost her appeal against the new charges brought by the Iranian regime.
