French Foreign Minister Catherine Colonna reiterated her call for the release of five French citizens held in Iran during telephone conversations with her Iranian counterpart Hossein Amir Abdollahian, who denounced what he called “European interference” in Iran’s internal affairs, stressing that “None of the parties are allowed to threaten their national security.
The French Foreign Ministry said in a statement that Colonna “raised the situation of our citizens arbitrarily detained in Iran and renewed our demand for their immediate release. She recalled the inadmissibility of broadcasting alleged confessions of two of them.
Last week, Tehran aired a video clip that was presented as containing “confessions” by union members Cecil Kohler and Jacques Paris; That caused a condemning reaction from Paris. The French minister said in a statement to radio station France Inter that five French people were detained in Iran, namely: Franco-Iranian researcher Fariba Adelha, who was arrested in June 2019 and then sentenced to five years in prison for “undermining national security” and Benjamin Brier, who was arrested in May 2020 and sentenced to eight years and eight months in prison for espionage, in addition to Kohler and Paris, who were arrested last May. As for the fifth detainee, he is “a Frenchman who was on a visit” to Tehran and was recently arrested, according to the ministry.
In late September last year, Tehran announced the arrest of nine foreigners, including a Frenchman, as part of a wave of protests that swept the country following the death of an Iranian-Kurdish woman, Mahsa Amini.
Although the momentum of the protests, which will soon be entering their second month, has not abated, Colonna “strongly condemned the repression practiced in Iran and called on this country to comply with the international obligations to which it has acceded.” In a statement to France Inter, Colonna said the European Union had agreed to impose sanctions against those responsible for the crackdown in Iran. She explained that those sanctions would be approved by the European Council next week, including an “asset freeze and travel ban” on those responsible for the crackdown that killed hundreds of people.
On the other hand, Fars news agency, which is affiliated with the Revolutionary Guards, quoted Minister Abdollahian during a telephone conversation with Colonna that Tehran “will not allow any internal or external party to harm its security.” In his tweet, he indicated that during the phone call he objected to “European interference in Iran’s internal affairs.” He warned that Tehran would “retaliate in kind” if the European Union imposed restrictions on it.
During another telephone conversation with Bulgarian Foreign Minister Nikolai Melkov, Abdollahyan criticized Western countries’ double standards on what he called “unrest” in Iran. “It’s amazing that fighting riots in Europe is good and necessary, but in Iran it is considered repression,” he said. He told his Bulgarian counterpart: “The Iranian constitution guarantees the people’s right to peaceful protest, but legitimate protest is completely different from organized riots and terrorism against the security of Iran, the life and property of its people.”
