Richard Ratcliffe’s long years of waiting for Nazanin

Richard Ratcliffe last year. In his first interview with the Observer he said: ‘I’m looking forward to the Saturdays when we’d all go off and do something, go to the park, feed the ducks.’ Photograph: Aaron Chown/PA

When I first met Richard Ratcliffe, back in 2017, his wife Nazanin had just been told that she could face an additional 16 years in an Iranian prison.

He had, by then, been separated from his three-year-old daughter Gabriella for half her life: she was captured as an 18-month-old baby along with her mother, and would spend the next three years in Iran, living with her grandparents.