During his annual speech to the ambassadors gathered at the Élysée Palace, Emmanuel Macron asked, on Monday August 28, for the release of the four French people detained “in unacceptable conditions” in Iran. “There is no justification for detention,” he added.
The four French people detained by Tehran are Louis Arnaud, since September 2022, Cécile Kohler, a French teacher, and her companion Jacques Paris, arrested in May 2022 for “espionage”, and another, whose identity has not been disclosed. .
“I just want to say with regard to Iran, first, that France will continue to have a clear policy. No weakness,” the French president assured, pointing out that the four French nationals currently in Iranian prisons were “arbitrarily detained.”
France and other states denounce what they call “hostage diplomacy” on the part of Iran, which consists of arresting Western nationals in order to obtain concessions such as the release of its own nationals.
Belgian humanitarian Olivier Vandecasteele, 42, was released at the end of May after fifteen months of detention, in exchange for an Iranian diplomat, Assadollah Assadi, sentenced in Belgium in 2021 for “attempted terrorist assassination” to twenty years in prison. prison.
For “humanitarian reasons”, this time, Benjamin Brière, a Frenchman, as well as Bernard Phelan, a Franco-Irishman whose state of health had deteriorated sharply, had been released last May.
