Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe's return to prison after three days with her daughter highlights the hypocrisy of the Iranian government

‘You can’t send a small child her mummy, then take her away again after three days. It is cruel. It is beyond cruel’, Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe reportedly said (Free Nazanin Campaign/AP)

The foreign secretary demands the “PERMANENT” release of an innocent woman let out on a three-day furlough. As it expires she is denied an extension and sent back to jail.

That would be frustrating on a Monopoly board – in real life it is a “crushing disappointment” as Amnesty International UK director Kate Allen puts it.

Jeremy Hunt’s strongly worded tweet on Thursday failed to secure the extension of Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe from Evin prison, in Tehran, where she has been held since April 2016, with eight months in solitary, and is now serving a five-year sentence for doing nothing. On Sunday she was sent back to prison after just three days to spend with her daughter.

According to the Free Nazanin Facebook page, as she was being returned to jail, she said: “You can't send a small child her mummy, and then take her away again after three days. It is cruel. It is beyond cruel.”

The 39-year-old added: “Who would take a child from their mother? I was so happy yesterday walking in the street seeing normal life again, but I also envied the people in the street yesterday walking holding their children's hands. I just want a normal life.”

There is, however, comeback from the cruelty in recognising a fact: her temporary release was never the Iranian government softening its stance on Nazanin – it was the British government softening its stance on its own citizen.

Defeating all expectations, Hunt met Zaghari-Ratcliffe’s husband Richard Ratcliffe twice after becoming foreign secretary in July. This level of responsiveness is unheard of for the Free Nazanin campaign. It took a year and a half to, finally, gain the attention of big politicians.

Zaghari-Ratcliffe’s mayor, Sadiq Khan, for instance, has to this day said nothing about her case bar calling for Boris Johnson’s resignation over his comments last year, when he mistakenly claimed she was in Iran to “teach journalism”. Ironically, it was this gaffe that actually put her case on the map nationally and internationally.

The Free Nazanin campaign now has the British government onside in a way that it couldn’t have dreamed of two years ago. Hunt has used upper case, for goodness sake. And he must continue to because Britain has the upper hand.

Flying in the face of US wishes, Britain earlier this month reopened the bank account for the Iranian embassy which was blocked owing to sanctions in 2009. The UK is also risking the ire of its special-relationship ally in saying all the things Iran wants to hear about the 2015 nuclear deal.

The Iranian currency is falling at a rate that makes daily life next to impossible. British Airways, citing commercial viability, last week stopped flights to Tehran from London.

It is now the Iranian government’s turn to soften its stance on Zaghari-Ratcliffe – and all political prisoners in Iran. This must be the demand from the UK government.

Whether or not the issue of Britain’s historical debt of £400m is the reason Nazanin is being kept is neither here nor there – Britain must take a leaf out of Richard Ratcliffe’s book, be bold and see his wife’s incarceration as part of systematic human rights abuses in Iran.

Read the Free Nazanin campaign’s Twitter feed and you will see concern for all political prisoners in Iran.

The case of Nasrin Sotoudeh, the outstanding human rights lawyer who started a hunger strike on Saturday after being arrested in June and detained in the same prison as Nazanin, has nothing to do with the money Britain owes Iran.

Nor does the case of Farhad Maysami, the human rights activist jailed at the beginning of the month, whose beatings at 4am his mother was reportedly woken up to hear down the phone.

Pressure must be brought to Iranian president Hassan Rouhani and foreign secretary Javad Zarif to stop human rights abuses.

Zarif, who charms interviewers with idiom-packed English language skills, picked up in the US where he obtained his PhD, is ever keen to point out, as the Saudis do, and the Mugabes do, that the judiciary is independent of the government – a judiciary that locks up an innocent mother, charged and convicted behind closed doors.

But then Zarif is a man who has also claimed that, as an academic, he has taught human rights since 1988.

What a year to cite. At this time 30 years ago, the Islamic Republic was conducting what are known as the “summer of 1988 killings” – 5,000 opponents of the regime murdered and buried in mass graves.

Still, Zarif and Rouhani have the power to demand that Zaghari-Ratcliffe and Sotoudeh are freed with other political prisoners to follow.

If they can’t or won’t, well, of course, the British government can’t ask them to resign. But to bring a mummy back to her daughter, it’s back to the Monopoly board, and one place that can take a tougher stance on Rouhani and Zarif and see them for the ruthless hardliners they truly are: Fleet Street.