UNITED Nations human rights experts have appealed to Iran to immediately release the wife of a Farnham man jailed in Tehran, and expressed “grave” concerns for her welfare.

Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, a British-Iranian citizen, is already 572 days into a five-year term in Tehran’s Evin Prison but is now facing fresh charges and could face an additional 16 years of imprisonment if convicted.

“We consider that Ms Zaghari-Ratcliffe has been arbitrarily deprived of her liberty and that her right to a fair trial before an independent and impartial tribunal has been violated,” the UN experts said in a news release by the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR).

Ms Zaghari-Ratcliffe was taken alone to court to hear the new charges against her, and was not allowed access to a lawyer during the hearing. Her lawyer had also not been informed of the new charges.

“We are gravely concerned over the mental and physical impact that the new charges have had on Ms Zaghari-Ratcliffe,” the experts added, calling on the Iranian authorities to release her at once and guarantee her physical and psychological wellbeing.

Nazanin was arrested by Iran’s Revolutionary guard in April 2016 as she tried to return home to London with her 21-month-old daughter Gabriella after a two-week holiday, and given a five-year sentence in September 2016 related to “national security matters”.

She has been confined in a high-security Iranian jail ever since while her daughter, now three, remains at the Tehran home of Nazanin’s parents, with her father, former Farnham man Richard Ratcliffe, back in London.

Nazanin is a project manager for the charitable foundation of the Thomson Reuters media organisation, but her family denies any suggestion that she is a spy as ludicrous.

In an interview with The Independent, Richard accused the Iranian regime of torturing his wife and appealed for Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson to intervene.

He said: “The simple truth is Nazanin is a British citizen – an innocent British citizen. But in 570 days in Iranian jails, she has never once been allowed to meet with an official from the British embassy.

“And though the Foreign and Commonwealth Office has said it is concerned, and then seriously concerned, never has Boris Johnson or anyone else from the FCO said plainly and publicly that what is being done to Nazanin is wrong. Never. Not once.

“For her sake, I have promised never to take Gabriella away from Iran without her say-so. She is my wife: she lives for those prison visits from her daughter.

“And so, refused a visa to visit Iran, I have watched via Skype as Gabriella lost the English phrases she once had – nearly all of them except ‘I love you’.

“She speaks fluent Farsi now. We have to communicate with gestures: funny faces, pretending to pour each other tea and drink it from little cups.

“At first, Gabriella saw the prison visits as ‘going to mummy’s bedroom’. Now she knows the truth: mummy is in prison.”