Iran Confirms Arrest of French Dual Citizen as Macron Eyes Talks
Iran Confirms Arrest of French Dual Citizen as Macron Eyes Talks
(Bloomberg) -- Iran confirmed the detention of a French-Iranian dual national academic whose arrest could throw another obstacle in the path of European attempts to lower tensions in the Persian Gulf and salvage the 2015 nuclear agreement.
Fariba Adelkhah was “among suspects recently arrested,” judiciary spokesman Gholamhossein Esameili said, according to Mizan Online, a website affiliated with Iran’s legal authorities. “Given the nature of the file, there hasn’t been an opportunity to make public statements on the matter,” he said, without giving a reason for Adelkhah’s detention.
President Emmanuel Macron said on Monday that French authorities had known of the arrest for several days but hadn’t been given an explanation.
“I have expressed my disagreement and my request for clarification to President Rouhani,” Macron said in Belgrade, citing the two leaders’ July 6 telephone call. “France obviously is protecting its citizens,” he added.
French authorities have been denied access to Adelkhah, whose work focuses on post-revolutionary Iran at Science Po in Paris, the Foreign Ministry said in a statement.
Her detention comes at a delicate moment for diplomacy. Last week, Macron’s top diplomatic adviser to Iran was in Tehran to find ways to get the Islamic Republic to dial back its violations of the landmark nuclear deal and avoid escalating tensions with European nations and the U.S.
While Macron said he didn’t believe the two issues were related nor would he seek to link them, any prolonged standoff over Adelkhah’s plight could complicate efforts to lower the political temperature in the Gulf, which has soared since the U.S. ratcheted up sanctions on Iran’s critical oil exports in May, prompting retaliatory steps from Tehran.
The Gozar website, which focuses on issues concerning human rights and democracy, reported on July 12 that members of the Revolutionary Guard detained the scholar June 7 at her home in Tehran, without saying where it got the information.
During last week’s visit to Iran, Macron envoy Emmanuel Bonne asked Iranian authorities to refrain from pursuing its “maximum resistance to maximum pressure” policy and fully comply with commitments made in the nuclear agreement, according to a French official in the president’s office.
To contact the reporters on this story: Helene Fouquet in Paris at hfouquet1@bloomberg.net;Ladane Nasseri in Dubai at lnasseri@bloomberg.net
To contact the editors responsible for this story: Ben Sills at bsills@bloomberg.net, Mark Williams, Paul Abelsky
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