More than seven months after her release from prison, Franco-Iranian researcher Fariba Adelkhah returned to France on Tuesday, Sciences Po reported on Wednesday (October 18). The Institute of Political Studies, where she worked, announced her release in February, but the researcher was not authorized to leave Iranian territory.
“Now all this is behind me,” Ms. Adelkhah commented to Agence France-Presse. What remains are all these gestures of friendship and commitment, these mobilizations of known and unknown people (…). And obviously, what the support committee was able to do beyond my case, and for more than four years, out of loyalty to the principle of scientific freedom. » “After so many years of deprivation of freedom, what an emotion to finally welcome our colleague Fariba, symbol of our fights for academic freedom,” reacted the director of Sciences Po, Mathias Vicherat, quoted in the press release.
A specialist in Shiism and post-revolutionary Iran, she was arrested, like her companion Roland Marchal, in June 2019. Sentenced to five years in prison in May 2020 for endangering national security, she had benefited from a “temporary release” in October 2020, before being incarcerated again in January 2022. Mr. Marchal, also a researcher, was released in March 2020, after Paris released the Iranian engineer Jalal Rohollahnejad, whose United States demanded extradition for violating US sanctions against Iran.
Paris “rejoices” at the liberation
Four French people remain detained in Iran: Cécile Kohler and Jacques Paris, arrested in May 2022, “during a tourist stay” according to their relatives, Louis Arnaud, a 36-year-old traveler, as well as another French person whose identity has never been made public.
Paris, through the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, “welcomes” the return to France of Ms. Adelkhah, but “reiterates its deep concern” regarding the four other French people still detained in Iran.
At this stage, it seems that Fariba Adelkhah has received permission to leave Iran without any compensation being paid by France. This while usually, countries concerned by the imprisonment of their citizens in Iran are obliged to make concessions to Tehran. In March 2022, Iranian-British Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, arrested in 2016 and sentenced to six years in prison for “sedition”, was finally allowed to leave Iran after the United Kingdom announced that it had settled with ‘Iran an old debt of almost around 470 million euros. Another emblematic example of “hostage diplomacy” used by Tehran: Belgian aid worker Olivier Vandecasteele. Arrested in 2022, he was released last May in exchange for Assadolah Assadi. This Iranian diplomat stationed in Austria was sentenced to twenty years in prison for having organized a planned attack which targeted a meeting of Iranian opponents in Villepinte (Seine-Saint-Denis), in France, in 2018.
Several dozen Westerners are detained by the Islamic Republic, described by their supporters as innocent individuals used as negotiating leverage. Iran, under international sanctions, and the great powers are trying to resuscitate an international agreement concluded in 2015 which guarantees the civilian nature of the nuclear program of Tehran, accused, despite its denials, of seeking to acquire atomic weapons.
