Woman Gets 10 Years in Prison for Spying for UK

Date: 13 May 2019 - 21:46

News ID: ۶۵۹۳۷

TEHRAN (Dispatches) – Iran said on Monday it has sentenced an Iranian woman to 10 years prison for spying for Britain.
"An Iranian who was in charge of Iran desk in the British Council and was cooperating with Britain’s intelligence agency... was sentenced to 10 years in prison after clear confessions,” Gholamhussein Esmaili, a judiciary spokesman, said.
Esmaili said the woman was in charge of projects for "cultural infiltration” in Iran. He did not identify her, but said she was a student in Britain before being recruited by the British Council.
Esmaili said the woman had been in custody for almost a year. The British Council is Britain’s cultural agency overseas.
The council is a UK charity governed by royal charter and a UK public body, receiving a 15% core funding grant from the UK government.
In 2009, Iran closed the British Council offices in Tehran in reaction to the launch, in London, of the BBC’s Persian service, which has become the UK government’s propaganda arm against Iran. In June 2009, following riots in the aftermath of a presidential election, several local staff working for the British embassy in Tehran were arrested for their role in the sedition.
In March, Britain went out of its way to provide diplomatic protection to Iranian citizen Nazanin Zaghari, who is serving her term in Iran on espionage charges.
Diplomatic protection is a rarely-used tool under international law, which gives a country the right to challenge another state over the treatment of one of its nationals or companies.
It is very different from diplomatic immunity, which applies to accredited diplomats and provides them with safe passage. It is also different from consular assistance, where a state offers assistance to its nationals in another country.
Britain has not afforded diplomatic protection to anyone in living memory prior to Zaghari.
Iranian Ambassador to London Hamid Baeidinejad has said the UK government’s extension of diplomatic protection to Zaghari contravenes international law.
Iran’s intelligence authorities arrested Zaghari at Imam Khomeini International Airport in April 2016 as she was on her way back to London.
She was subsequently put on trial and handed a five-year jail term after being found guilty of spying and spreading propaganda against the Islamic Republic.
British media had claimed that she worked for the Thomson Reuters Foundation and was on vacation in Iran when she was arrested. However, former UK Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson said in a statement to a parliamentary committee in 2017 that Zaghari had been "simply teaching people journalism.”
Johnson's remarks amounted to an accidental confession that Zaghari was plotting against the Iranian government, but British authorities described them a gaffe.