Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe is to go on hunger strike in her jail cell to show solidarity with another dual citizen detained in Iran, as the regime urged Western countries to stay out of its legal affairs. Mrs Zaghari-Ratcliffe, a British-Iranian woman who was jailed in 2016 on spurious charges of spying, will join Kylie Moore-Gilbert, a British-Australian academic, in refusing food. Ms Moore-Gilbert is serving a ten-year
prison sentence on spying charges. She has demanded at minimum to be moved out of solitary confinement, according to the Guardian. “Five days on dry hunger strike is becoming critical, and our thoughts go out to Kylie and her family for all this ordeal,” said Richard Ratcliffe, her husband. He added: “It gives some sense of just how desperate 16 months in solitary makes you. At some point you really feel you have nothing left to get noticed, nothing left to lose.” Mrs Zaghari-Ratcliffe was visiting her family in
Iran in April 2016 when she was arrested, accused of a plot to topple the Iranian government and then sentenced to five years in jail. It came as Iran accused
France of "interference" in the case of another detained dual citizen, a French-Iranian academic who is facing spying charges. Last week, France summoned Iran's ambassador to protest the imprisonment of Fariba Adelkhah and another academic, Roland Marchal, describing their detention as "intolerable". Their imprisonment has added to distrust between Tehran and
Paris at a time when French President
Emmanuel Macron is seeking to play a leading role in defusing tensions between Iran and its arch-foe, the United States. "The statement by France's foreign ministry regarding an Iranian national is an act of interference and we see their request to have no legal basis," Iran's foreign ministry spokesman Abbas Mousavi said in a statement. "The individual in question [Adelkhah] is an Iranian national and has been arrested over 'acts of espionage'," he said, adding that her lawyer had knowledge about the details of the case which is being investigated.