Skip to main contentSkip to navigationSkip to navigation
Adelkhah Fariba
Fariba Adelkhah was sentenced to five years in 2020 for conspiring against national security, a charge her supporters call absurd. Photograph: Thomas Arrive/Sciences Po/AFP/Getty Images
Fariba Adelkhah was sentenced to five years in 2020 for conspiring against national security, a charge her supporters call absurd. Photograph: Thomas Arrive/Sciences Po/AFP/Getty Images

Iran sends French-Iranian academic back to jail at key point in nuclear talks

This article is more than 2 years old

France says Fariba Adelkhah’s unexplained return to prison will damage efforts to revive 2015 curbs on nuclear programme

Iran has sent back to prison from house arrest French-Iranian academic Fariba Adelkhah, a shock development in the midst of delicate talks on the Iranian nuclear drive.

Adelkhah was sentenced in May 2020 to five years in prison for conspiring against national security, accusations her supporters have always denounced as absurd. She was allowed home in Tehran in October 2020 with an electronic bracelet.

The French foreign ministry expressed “astonishment” at Adelkah’s reimprisonment on Wednesday, calling for her immediate release and adding the move had come with “no explanation or preliminary warning”.

“The decision can only have negative consequences on the relationship between France and Iran and reduce confidence between our two countries,” the foreign ministry said.

She is one of at least a dozen western nationals believed to be held in Iran who activists say are being held as hostages at the behest of the elite Revolutionary Guards to extract concessions from the west.

With talks under way in Vienna aimed at salvaging the 2015 nuclear deal between Iran and world powers, the French foreign ministry warned the move would damage bilateral relations and trust.

“It is with great shock and indignation that we have been informed that Fariba Adelkhah … has been re-imprisoned in the prison of Evin” in Tehran, the committee set up to support her said in a statement.

“The Iranian government is cynically using our colleague for external or internal purposes that remain opaque, and that have nothing to do with her activities,” it added.

The committee accused the authorities of “deliberately endangering Fariba Adelkhah’s health and even her life”, pointing to the death this month in Iranian custody of poet Baktash Abtin after he contracted Covid.

The surprise move by the Iranian authorities to move Adelkhah back to prison comes at a hugely sensitive juncture in talks involving France and other world powers aimed at reviving the deal on the Iranian nuclear programme.

France’s foreign minister, Jean-Yves Le Drian, complained on Tuesday that the pace of the talks in Vienna is “too slow”, in marked contrast to the more upbeat tone from officials in Tehran.

Also being held in Iran is Frenchman Benjamin Briere, who his family describe as an innocent tourist but was detained while travelling in May.

Briere’s family announced last month he had begun a hunger strike to protest at his detention conditions and the lack of evolution in his case.

A specialist in Shia Islam and a research director at Sciences Po university in Paris, Adelkhah was arrested in June 2019 along with her French colleague and partner Roland Marchal.

Marchal was released in March 2020 in an apparent prisoner swap after France released Iranian engineer Jalal Rohollahnejad, who faced extradition to the United States over accusations he violated US sanctions against Iran.

Adelkah’s support group said she had been imprisoned “on trumped-up charges and without any proper trial”.

Nationals of all three European powers involved in the talks on the Iranian nuclear programme – Britain, France and Germany – are among those foreigners being held.

In a separate development on Wednesday, the British Council said its staffer, Iranian citizen Aras Amiri, had returned to the United Kingdom after being cleared on appeal of a 10-year jail sentence for “cultural infiltration” in Iran.

The 2015 deal – agreed by Iran, the United States, China, Russia, Britain, France and Germany – offered Tehran sanctions relief in exchange for curbs on its nuclear programme.

But then US president Donald Trump unilaterally withdrew the United States in 2018 and reimposed biting sanctions, prompting Tehran to begin rolling back on its commitments.

More on this story

More on this story

  • Sweden demands immediate release of EU diplomat from Iran jail

  • Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe has ‘constant worry’ about family in Iran

  • Narges Mohammadi: a defiant voice for women’s rights in Iran

  • US and Iran expected to complete $6bn prisoner swap deal

  • US-Iran prisoner swap: the detainees freed in exchange agreement

  • ‘Loss for Iran’s wildlife’: woman jailed in Tehran calls for environmentalists’ release

  • Iran expected to execute three protesters over killing of police officers

  • James Cleverly says Iran must halt execution of British citizen

  • Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe tells Andy Murray of ‘joy’ of watching him play from prison

Most viewed

Most viewed