Press release: “Iranian Authorities Send Iranian-French Researcher Back to Prison”, Human Rights Watch, 18 janvier 2022

Iranian authorities reincarcerated prominent French-Iranian prominent academic Fariba Adelkhah, the Fariba Adelkhah Support Committee reported on January 12. In October 2020, authorities had released Adelkhah, who had been detained in Evin prison since July 2019, to house arrest with an electronic tag.

The Iranian authorities have claimed that Adelkhah had failed to comply with the rules of her house arrest without providing any additional details. In June 2020, an Iranian court upheld a 5-year prison sentence against Adelkhah, an anthropologist at the Sciences Po university, on vague national security charges.

Adelkhah’s case is one of the several known instances of Iranian dual nationals who are detained in Iran on vaguely defined national security charges with authorities failing to provide any convincing evidence for their charges. Human Rights Watch has documented the pattern of Iranian authorities’ targeting of foreign and dual nationals with unfounded charges and using them as bargaining chips in negotiations with western countries.

The reimprisonment of Fariba Adelkah once again shows the cynicism and cruelty of this policy. Authorities should immediately release her.