Fariba Adelkhah, a Franco-Iranian researcher, remained in captivity in Iran for almost four years. Paris assures that it has done everything possible for his release.
The negotiations obviously always take place behind the scenes, but the return to France, Tuesday October 17, of Fariba Adelkhah shows at least that Paris and Tehran have never stopped talking to each other while relations between the two capitals are very tense due to of the regime’s repression of the protest movements which are shaking the country. The Quai d’Orsay expresses its relief and assures “sparing no effort” to facilitate his release. But he asked the researcher and the members of her support committee at Sciences Po where she taught not to speak out for the moment. Fariba Adelkhah contented herself with a brief statement of thanks on Wednesday evening.
Since February she was no longer in prison, but held in Iran after four trying years. Arrested on June 5, 2019 in Tehran with her colleague and companion Roland Marshal, she was sentenced to five years in prison for endangering national security. Iran, not recognizing dual nationality, considers it 100% Iranian. She was incarcerated in Evin prison then placed under an electronic bracelet and then reincarcerated. She begins a 49-day hunger strike. In February, thanks to a collective pardon, she was released but prohibited from leaving the country.
“State hostages”
Those close to him have always proclaimed his innocence. Fariba Adelkhah is not a spy, her only crime is to take a critical look at Iranian society, to be an independent and intrepid researcher who was never afraid to go into the field, they say. Fariba Adelkhah is a specialist in social and political anthropology; her work on Iran has been translated into several languages and has earned her a certain notoriety in academia. For her support committee, she was a political prisoner, a hostage to arbitrariness. We will undoubtedly have details on his release later. What we know is that Iran, which currently detains around ten Western nationals, generally uses them as a bargaining chip.
This is called “hostage diplomacy”, practiced by other authoritarian regimes such as China, Russia, Venezuela or North Korea. In the case of Fariba Adelkhah we do not yet know what was negotiated but most often foreigners like her are accused of conspiracy or espionage, detained arbitrarily under cover of national laws, with the objective of counterpart.
Their number continues to increase. Negotiations can last several years. We remember the British journalist Nazanine Zaghari Radcliff, released in 2022 after six years of detention. This required London to pay a debt of more than 400 million euros linked to an order for undelivered tanks dating from the time of the Shah. A month ago, five Americans were released. In exchange, five Iranians prosecuted or convicted in the United States benefited from clemency measures and six billion dollars of Iranian money, frozen in South Korea due to sanctions, were released. The negotiations lasted several years. In May a Belgian humanitarian worker was released in exchange for an Iranian diplomat sentenced in Belgium to 20 years in prison. Remember that there are still four French people detained in Iran: two trade unionist teachers, Cécile Kholer and her partner Jacques Paris, a 39-year-old consultant, Louis Arnaud, and a French national whose identity the French authorities refuse to give. French people that Paris regularly qualifies “state hostages“.