𝐓𝐰𝐨 𝐌𝐨𝐫𝐞 𝐘𝐞𝐚𝐫𝐬 𝐟𝐨𝐫 𝐓𝐞𝐥𝐥𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐓𝐫𝐮𝐭𝐡

A judge in Tehran has added two years to Craig Foreman's sentence. Not for espionage. Not for anything they could dress up as a crime against the state. For talking to a journalist from inside his cell.

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c4gygp4pk31o

Craig and his wife, Dr Lindsay Foreman, have been held in Iran since January 2025. They were sentenced last February to ten years each on espionage charges they have always denied — charges the British government has called "totally unjustifiable."

In June their appeal was heard and dismissed; the family says the couple weren't even permitted to attend. Two independent UN experts have since said the Foremans appear to have been wrongfully detained, following proceedings that failed to meet the most basic guarantees of a fair trial. They have been on hunger strike since May.

And now, for the offence of describing his own conditions out loud, Craig gets another two years. His stepson Joe Bennett says Craig was taken before a judge with no lawyer, no translator, and no chance to say a word in his own defence. That is the whole hearing. That is the entire machinery of justice, start to finish.
The British Foreign Office says it is "urgently following up." I've read a lot of Foreign Office statements over the past eighteen months. They all read like that.

𝐈 𝐭𝐚𝐤𝐞 𝐭𝐡𝐢𝐬 𝐩𝐞𝐫𝐬𝐨𝐧𝐚𝐥𝐥𝐲, 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐈 𝐬𝐡𝐨𝐮𝐥𝐝 𝐞𝐱𝐩𝐥𝐚𝐢𝐧 𝐰𝐡𝐲.

𝐖𝐞 𝐰𝐞𝐫𝐞 𝐜𝐚𝐩𝐭𝐮𝐫𝐞𝐝. 𝐖𝐞 𝐰𝐞𝐫𝐞 𝐝𝐞𝐭𝐚𝐢𝐧𝐞𝐝. 𝐖𝐞 𝐰𝐞𝐫𝐞 𝐢𝐧𝐭𝐞𝐫𝐫𝐨𝐠𝐚𝐭𝐞𝐝 𝐟𝐨𝐫 𝐦𝐨𝐫𝐞 𝐭𝐡𝐚𝐧 𝐬𝐞𝐯𝐞𝐧𝐭𝐲 𝐡𝐨𝐮𝐫𝐬.

Seventy hours. Three days and a bit. I've had longer weekends. And yet I can tell you the exact texture of that room, the specific weight of not knowing whether anyone outside knew where we were, the way time stops behaving like time when someone else owns every minute of it. I spent thirty years in the New Zealand Army and the New Zealand Police.

I have been trained for pressure, and I have applied pressure. None of that made the room smaller. What it did was let me recognise, with absolute clarity, exactly what was being done to us and why.

Seventy hours nearly broke us both. The Foremans are at eighteen months. Craig has just been told to add two years to the far end of a decade.

𝐈 𝐜𝐚𝐧𝐧𝐨𝐭 𝐦𝐚𝐤𝐞 𝐭𝐡𝐚𝐭 𝐚𝐫𝐢𝐭𝐡𝐦𝐞𝐭𝐢𝐜 𝐬𝐢𝐭 𝐬𝐭𝐢𝐥𝐥 𝐢𝐧 𝐦𝐲 𝐡𝐞𝐚𝐝.
Here is what people who haven't been through it tend to misunderstand. They imagine the horror is the violence, or the threat of it. Sometimes it is. But mostly the horror is the arbitrariness — the discovery that there is no rule you can follow to make it stop.

You cannot behave your way out. You cannot reason your way out. There is no sentence you can say that will unlock the door, because the door was never about anything you said.

Lindsay described Evin to the BBC as an endurance test for the mind. She's a psychologist with a doctorate; she was, when they were taken, in the middle of a research project asking people around the world what it means to be human and what makes a good life. Consider the obscenity of where that question has landed her.

Craig is a carpenter. He is being held in the political wing of a prison notorious for exactly what you think it is notorious for.

And the two extra years tell you everything about what this is. If they genuinely believed they had caught two spies, an interview with the BBC would be irrelevant — the case would speak for itself. You only punish speech when the speech is the thing that threatens you.

The sentence extension isn't law enforcement. It's a warning to everyone else in Evin: describe this and it costs you.
Craig is a carpenter. He is being held in the political wing of a prison notorious for exactly what you think it is notorious for.

𝐀𝐧𝐝 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐭𝐰𝐨 𝐞𝐱𝐭𝐫𝐚 𝐲𝐞𝐚𝐫𝐬 𝐭𝐞𝐥𝐥 𝐲𝐨𝐮 𝐞𝐯𝐞𝐫𝐲𝐭𝐡𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐚𝐛𝐨𝐮𝐭 𝐰𝐡𝐚𝐭 𝐭𝐡𝐢𝐬 𝐢𝐬.
If they genuinely believed they had caught two spies, an interview with the BBC would be irrelevant — the case would speak for itself. You only punish speech when the speech is the thing that threatens you. The sentence extension isn't law enforcement. It's a warning to everyone else in Evin: describe this and it costs you.

Which is precisely why it needs describing.

Janelle and I got out. I have never fully worked out why us and not others, and I've stopped pretending the answer is anything more edifying than luck and timing, and our God looking after us.. That's not modesty. It's the thing that keeps me awake. There is no version of this where I earned my way through that door and Craig Foreman didn't.

So I won't offer the Foreman family the usual noises. Joe Bennett has said he feels abandoned — letters to the Prime Minister, letters to the Foreign Secretary, no replies. I'm not in a position to fix that, and I'm not going to insult him by pretending a column can.

What I can do is refuse to let this become background noise. Eighteen months in, these stories go quiet. The rallies thin out. The updates move down the page. That silence is not neutral — it is the exact condition under which a judge can add two years to a man's life on a Wednesday morning and expect nobody to notice.
Somebody noticed. I noticed. I have been in that room, briefly, and I got to come home.

Craig and Lindsay Foreman have not.

And Yes you may say that they shouldn’t have been in Iran, against all Govt warnings. That is not the issue now. The humanity of the situation the Forman’s find themselves in is the real issue, and what we as humans should pray for now.
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Pete O'Keeffe travelled 67,000km overland from the UK to New Zealand with his wife Janelle. They were detained and interrogated in Iran for over seventy hours. Their account is told in The Long Road Home.