On Boxing Day, Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe should have celebrated her 40th birthday surrounded by family and friends.
Instead she marked the landmark date languishing in an Iranian prison cell on bogus spying charges.
Today marks 1,000 days since the mother-of-ones arrest and her husband has now vowed to step-up his campaign to get her released.
Richard Ratcliffe has called her incarceration a human tragedy and her health is now suffering.
Prison officials wont let her get medical treatment for worrying lumps in her breast and he said there is an overwhelming sadness at missing Christmas and her birthday.
Richard said: Nazanin has been wrongly detained in an Iranian prison for over two years. She has done nothing wrong, has broken no laws. The charges against her are completely false.
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She is innocent and should not be kept in prison, separated for so long from her family and her young daughter.
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While shes imprisoned, Nazanin continues to suffer both physically and mentally.
It is a travesty of justice that Nazanin continues to be detained.
Nazanin, a British-Iranian, was arrested at Tehrans Imam Khomeini airport in April 2016 during a visit to see her family with her daughter Gabriella.
The charity worker, of Hampstead in north London, was later sentenced to five years in jail after being accused of spying, a charge she vehemently denies.
She has served more than a third of her sentence and so is eligible for release but Richard said the Iranian authorities are playing power games by keeping her in jail.
Gabriella, four, is staying with Nazanins family in Iran but has now almost lost the ability to speak English and so cannot communicate with her father.
On Boxing Day, they skyped each other and blew out candles on a cake to mark Nazanins birthday.
Richard told Metro.co.uk that 1,000 days is my line in the sand.
He added: In some ways, its just a day. Just like day 997 or day 1,003. It is still terrible.
But this becomes a line in the sand because we didnt get the Christmas release.
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Now there is an impasse and nothing has moved. Nazanin is just miserable and crying. There is an overwhelming sadness.
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This week, its been Christmas, her 40th birthday and the 1,000 days in prison. They have all loomed large.
There is a real feeling that nothing has worked. What will it take to unlock this?
In the new year, I will sit down with the lawyers and say “OK, that next?.”
It will be a new phase now we have reached 1,000 days.
We will need to push harder. We will need to do more strident moves and use whatever options there are.
Richard said there are two formal diplomatic steps he will push for.
The first would be to give Nazanin so-called diplomatic protection, which means that whatever happens to her is seen as an abuse directly by Iran against the British state.
He added that because she is not the only Westerner jailed in Iran, it would be possible to go to the UN Security Council for them to intervene.
Hopes had been raised that Nazanin would be released before Christmas after her lawyer was invited onto state television to talk about the case.
British-Iranian academic Abbas Edalat, a computer science and maths professor at Imperial College London, was also recently released after being arrested in April.
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In August, Nazanin was overjoyed to be allowed out of jail to spend time with Gabriella.
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She was eligible for a months temporary release but was sent back to jail within days.
After she was prematurely returned, she suffered from panic attacks and fainted in her cell on the womens wing of the notorious Evin prison.
Richard said they will not ask for temporary release again.
It was so damaging. Emotionally it was very tough for Nazanin and when she got back to prison, she collapsed.
It was hard for Gabriella too because she was given her mummy and she then got taken away.
It all felt like a power game.
Richard added that they are using her deteriorating health to punish her even more.
Her health is not good. She has pains in her neck and she has had lumps in her breast for the last month.
She had them a year ago and luckily they were benign but Nazanin has been complaining about them again.
Her suffering is conspicuous and she is a target.
Foreign Secretary Jeremy Hunt pressed his Iranian counterpart, Mohammad Zarif, about her case in September when they met in New York on the fringes of a United Nations General Assembly.
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In November, he also went out to Iran and was not allowed to meet Nazanin but did meet her daughter.
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The question of whether Nazanin is given diplomatic protection would be a matter for Mr Hunt and was a move that was being considered by Boris Johnson before his resignation because of Brexit in July.
Nazanin works as a project manager for the Thomson-Reuters Foundation, which delivers charitable projects across the world although does not operate in Iran.
After her arrest as she attempted to return to London following a routine family trip, she was convicted of plotting to overthrow Irans Islamic clerical establishment.
It is a charge strongly denied by both her family and the British Government.
Richard added: Sadly, Nazanin is not the only innocent Londoner to be incarcerated in Iran.
There are cases of British citizens being arrested when simply visiting their families. They cannot be forgotten and the Government must relentlessly fight for their release too.
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