” L“All of France” is mobilized for the release of Fariba Adelkhah. Thursday, January 13, Emmanuel Macron denounced the “totally arbitrary” reincarceration in Iran of the Franco-Iranian researcher. “This incarceration is based on absolutely no evidence. She is indeed a scientific prisoner,” added the Head of State at the start of a speech to university presidents in Paris.
Fariba Adelkhah, 62, was imprisoned again while under house arrest since October 2020. She was arrested in June 2019 and then sentenced in May 2020 to five years in prison for breaches of national security, which that his supporters have always denied. France is “fully mobilized by his side, alongside his relatives and all scientists”, assured Emmanuel Macron. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs had warned the day before that his reincarceration could only have “negative” consequences on the relationship between France and Iran and “reduce confidence between our two countries”.
The “cynical” actions of the Iranian authorities
His support committee in Paris has also denounced the “cynical” actions of the Iranian power which would use the case of the researcher “according to external or internal ends which remain opaque”. This reversal comes as Iran and several countries (France, United Kingdom, Germany, Russia, China, plus the United States indirectly) relaunched talks in November to save the 2015 agreement (“JCPOA” ), supposed to prevent Tehran from acquiring atomic weapons, a particularly burning issue that is scrutinized throughout the region.
Jean-Yves Le Drian said on Tuesday that these negotiations were “too slow”, seeming to reduce the optimism he had expressed a few days earlier. The anthropologist Fariba Adelkhah, researcher at the Center for International Research (CERI) of Sciences Po Paris and specialist in Shiism, and her companion, the Africanist Roland Marchal, who came to join her for a private visit, were arrested on June 5, 2019 in Tehran airport by the Revolutionary Guards, the ideological army of the Islamic Republic. Roland Marchal was released on March 20, 2020 as part of an exchange of detainees between Tehran and Paris.
