Ana Diamond

Diamond moved to Finland with her parents when she was a toddler and went to Ressu International Baccalaureate School in Helsinki. She later returned to United Kingdom and grew up in London. She studied Film Studies and Theology at King's College London, graduating with First-Class Honours in 2019.[6] She is of British descent and holds British and Finnish citizenships.[2][3] Diamond's paternal great great grandparents were English Unitarian missionaries who traveled to Iran in the 19th century. They settled in Urmia, Iran, home to one of the earliest Christian churches, the Assyrian Church of the East, and the site of the first American Christian mission in Iran in 1835.

Diamond announced on her Twitter that she had been a finalist for the 2021 Rhodes Scholarship.[7]

Diamond travelled to the United States as part of the University of California Education Abroad Program and studied a semester at University of California, Santa Barbara before going on a pilgrimage to Israel in July 2014. She documented the co-existence of the Jewish, Christian and Muslim people in the Old City, Jerusalem, which was one of the alleged evidences later used by Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps to prove her "spy work" for MI6 and Mossad.[2]

On 12 January 2016, she was formally arrested with her parents after approximately 500 days of travel ban. During this period, she had been subjected to extensive interrogations by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. Diamond spent roughly 200 days in solitary confinement in the high-security 2-A IRGC solitary units in Evin Prison.[8] Diamond was briefly transferred to the public ward, where she met prominent female political prisoners, including Narges Mohammadi and Atena Farghadani. At the time, Diamond was the youngest female inmate in Evin Prison and one of the few dual-nationals to undergo a forced virginity test during detention, as well as a mock execution.[9] Diamond has described her treatment as "demeaning" and as "torture".[3]

Unlike other political and national security prisoners, Diamond was tried at the Special Clerical Court due to her high-profile family clerical background. Her prosecutor was Ebrahim Raisi, later a presidential candidate in 2017 Iranian presidential election running against President Hassan Rouhani. Diamond was charged with "espionage", "collaboration with the hostile government of England and MI6, and others" and apostasy. Her earlier involvement in UK youth politics as a spokeswoman for Conservative Future and her photos with various high-profile politicians, including Boris Johnson and Janet Napolitano, were used to present her as a special adviser for the Conservative Party and as an MI6 and CIA spy. At the end of the trial, she was found guilty and was sentenced to death.[3]

In August 2016, Diamond was released on bail pending trial in excess of about £130,000. She was placed on house arrest and subsequently her sentence commuted to 10 years. In 2017, all charges against her were dropped, and in May 2018 she was able to flee Iran with an emergency passport. Diamond returned to London.[10]

Since her return to the UK, Diamond has been open about the psychological trauma inflicted on her and the physical damages that she developed during her detention, one of them being a severe cardiac arrhythmia.[11] She underwent two heart operations in London within a year after her return.

In September 2019, Diamond became one of the founding members of The Alliance Against State Hostage Taking, alongside Richard Ratcliffe, Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe's husband, Jason Rezaian, and Nizar Zakka. The Alliance was launched at the 74th United Nations General Assembly in New York City in 2019.[1] She has also worked closely with Freedom from Torture and Hostage UK in understanding the trauma of returning hostages and their rights to demand enforceable reparation, including restitution, compensation, and rehabilitation.

Since the launch of the Alliance, Diamond has collaborated on a documentary with BBC Panorama to highlight that the arrest of dual and foreign nationals in Iran is often associated with the aim of extracting money, facilitating prisoner exchanges, lifting of sanctions, repayment of arms debts or other concessions.[12] On 4th September, two weeks after the release of the documentary, the British Defence Secretary Ben Wallace (politician) acknowledged for the first time that the payment of the £400 million UK-Iran debt could help secure the release of remaining British dual nationals in Iran.[13] However, the following day, Iran’s Foreign Ministry spokesperson rejected any links between the disputed debt and the arrest of dual nationals, considering the two issues 'separate matters'. He said the UK government is in debt to Iran "no matter whether a UK government official acknowledges the debt or not."[14]

Diamond was one of the first individuals to speak out on the aggravating conditions of Kylie Moore-Gilbert's incarceration in Evin Prison and her prolonged detention in solitary confinement. She has described how extended periods of solitary confinement can cause "irrational rage, self-loathing, self-harming thoughts, paranoia, hallucinations," and are "so detrimental to one's body and mental health."[15]

In July 2020, with Nasrin Sotoudeh's husband, Reza Khandan, Diamond reported that Moore-Gilbert had been transferred from Evin to Qarchak prison as a "form of punishment".[16] Following a lengthy but successful campaign for Dr Moore-Gilbert's release, Diamond gave an interview to the Guardian and said that “The Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps have been practising and perfecting their state hostage-taking for many decades now," and that she is working on a "legal path to hold Iran accountable for their atrocious violations of human rights and the deliberate and planned acts of kidnapping and torture of foreign nationals."[17]

In October 2020, she spoke on a panel about Hostage Diplomacy alongside Alistair Burt, former British Minister of State for Middle East and North Africa (2017–2019); Patrick Wintour, the Diplomatic Editor of the Guardian; Xiyue Wang, a former hostage and a scholar at Princeton University; and Sanam Vakil, the Deputy Head of Chatham House Middle East and North Africa Programme.[18]

In September 2020, in the week leading up to the holy day of Ashura, Diamond wrote an open letter in both English and Persian to the Supreme Leader of Iran, Ayatollah Seyyed Ali Khamenei, and urged him to intervene in the new criminal case brought against Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe. She sharply contrasted the religious ideology of the Islamic Republic with its counterproductive practices and wrote that:

The Islamic Iran that once professed to honour the legacy of Imam Ali (PBUH) and Hazrateh Fatimah (PBUH) and sought to lead by the example of the Imamat has sadly become so distracted by international power conflicts and media wars that it has forgotten its foundational principles. Your Excellency, our Shi’a Imams were killed for their steadfast adherence to justice. Imam Hossein (PBUH) and his 72 family members were martyred because of their dedication to eradicating tyranny and ending oppression [...] I trust you to understand that these actions, if even slightly miscalculated, will in equal measure diminish Iran’s legitimacy not only in the international political arena but also in the religious circles.[19]

Her letter was well-received and widely circulated in the Persian-language broadcasters, including Radio Zamaneh.[20] In her letter, she wrote briefly about her late-grandfather, Ayatollah Gholamreza Hassani, who was the first and longest-serving Imam of Masjid-e-Jamé mosque of the city of Urmia in northwest Iran after the Islamic Revolution in 1979.

• List of foreign nationals detained in Iran