According to information from Paris, seven French people are now in Iranian prisons. They are “state hostages” for the State Department, and Secretary Colonna is demanding their immediate release. Meanwhile, there are already charges against protesters who face the death penalty.
According to the government in Paris, two other French citizens have been arrested in Iran. There are now seven French people in prison there, Foreign Minister Catherine Colonna told the newspaper Le Parisien. “We were concerned about two other compatriots and the latest checks found that they are also detained,” she said.
She was outraged by Iran’s “hostage diplomacy”. France will do everything in its power to free its compatriots. “We demand their immediate release, access to consular protection, that is, the right to consular visits for our nationals,” Colonna said.
She gave no details about the case of the other two arrested. Your Iranian counterpart has committed to respecting this right of access. “It is more important than ever to remind Iran of its international obligations,” the foreign minister told the newspaper. “If his aim was to blackmail us, that shouldn’t work. That’s the wrong way to deal with France.”
Among the French arrested in Iran, some also have Iranian nationality. At the beginning of October, the French Foreign Ministry accused Iran of holding a French couple arrested in May as “state hostages” and of showing them on television in an unacceptable manner.
In Iran, people have been protesting against the government and the Islamic system of rule since mid-September. The trigger was the death of the 22-year-old Iranian Kurd Mahsa Amini in police custody. Since her death, tens of thousands have been demonstrating across the country against the government’s repressive course and the Islamic system of rule. According to the US-based human rights organization HRANA, 336 protesters have been killed in the riots as of Friday, including 52 minors. 39 members of the security forces were also killed. So far, almost 15,100 people have been arrested because of the protests, it said.
The Iranian judiciary is now also beginning to implement the draconian punishments threatened against anti-government demonstrators. Ten men and one woman have been charged with the killing of a member of the Basij militias during a rally near Tehran on November 3, IRNA news agency reports. You face the death penalty.
Despite the massive repression, activists in Iran are calling for a mass demonstration next week to mark the third anniversary of the brutal crackdown on protests in 2019. The 2019 wave of protests known as “Bloody November” was sparked by a surprise overnight hike in gas prices of up to 200 percent. During the days of unrest that followed, police stations were attacked, shops were looted, and banks and petrol stations were set on fire. The authorities imposed a one-week internet ban.
