Australia raises imprisoned academic with Iran

Australia’s foreign minister said on Friday she had raised with her Iranian counterpart the fate of an imprisoned Australian-British academic after a report that the woman had urged the Australian government to help free her.

Foreign Minister Marise Payne declined to detail her conversation with Mohammad Javad Zarif about convicted academic Kylie Moore-Gilbert on the sidelines of a global leadership conference in India.

“This is not a detention that we support. We don’t accept the charges,” Payne told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation in New Delhi.

“I don’t think it’s appropriate to talk about the details of that conversation, but to assure Australians and to assure Dr Moore-Gilbert’s family that I have raised that matter again,” she added.

Ms Moore-Gilbert, a Melbourne University lecturer on Middle Eastern studies, has been held in the notorious Evin Prison in Tehran since September 2018. She was arrested at Tehran airport while trying to leave the country after attending an academic conference.

She was convicted of spying and sentenced to 10 years in prison. A recent appeal was rejected.

The Guardian reported Moore-Gilbert wrote to Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison in June: "I beg you to act faster to bring this terrible trauma that myself and my family must live through day after day."

She wrote again in December: “Six months have passed … during this time I have remained in the same prison without any improvement in my intolerable conditions,” the newspaper reported.

“Over the past nine months I have been completely banned from any contact with my family, with the exception of a three-minute phone call (with my father), which was only granted after I took desperate measures which put my own life at risk,” she wrote.

“I have undertaken five hunger strikes as my only means to raise my voice, but to no avail. As predicted, I have now received a conviction of 10 years in prison, and my appeal … has failed,” she wrote.

“I beg of you, Prime Minister Morrison, to take immediate action, as my physical and mental health continues to deteriorate with every additional day that I remain imprisoned in these conditions,” she added.

The letters were smuggled out of prison and published by the Centre for Human Rights in Iran, the newspaper said.

Ms Payne said last week that Ms Moore-Gilbert’s plight was a factor in Australia’s consideration of whether it would follow the United States in ratcheting up sanctions against Iran in retaliation for a missile strike on two Iraqi military bases hosting US troops.

“The government has been working extremely hard in relation to the ongoing detention of Kylie Moore-Gilbert,” Ms Payne said.

“We don’t accept the charges on which she has been held and are concerned for her protection and the conditions under which she is held.

“It is always a focus for us in terms of important consular matters such as this, but we make every decision that we make in Australia’s national interests,” Ms Payne added.

Australia has yet to announce new sanctions.

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Will the pound fall to parity with the dollar?

The idea of pound parity now seems less far-fetched as the risk grows that Britain may split away from the European Union without a deal.

Rupert Harrison, a fund manager at BlackRock, sees the risk of it falling to trade level with the dollar on a no-deal Brexit. The view echoes Morgan Stanley’s recent forecast that the currency can plunge toward $1 (Dh3.67) on such an outcome. That isn’t the majority view yet – a Bloomberg survey this month estimated the pound will slide to $1.10 should the UK exit the bloc without an agreement.

New Prime Minister Boris Johnson has repeatedly said that Britain will leave the EU on the October 31 deadline with or without an agreement, fuelling concern the nation is headed for a disorderly departure and fanning pessimism toward the pound. Sterling has fallen more than 7 per cent in the past three months, the worst performance among major developed-market currencies.

“The pound is at a much lower level now but I still think a no-deal exit would lead to significant volatility and we could be testing parity on a really bad outcome,” said Mr Harrison, who manages more than $10 billion in assets at BlackRock. “We will see this game of chicken continue through August and that’s likely negative for sterling,” he said about the deadlocked Brexit talks.

The pound fell 0.8 per cent to $1.2033 on Friday, its weakest closing level since the 1980s, after a report on the second quarter showed the UK economy shrank for the first time in six years. The data means it is likely the Bank of England will cut interest rates, according to Mizuho Bank.

The BOE said in November that the currency could fall even below $1 in an analysis on possible worst-case Brexit scenarios. Options-based calculations showed around a 6.4 per cent chance of pound-dollar parity in the next one year, markedly higher than 0.2 per cent in early March when prospects of a no-deal outcome were seemingly off the table.

Bloomberg