Adelkhah: Iranian pressure card on France

Nora Bandari

Iran uses the file of “dual nationality” to pressure the European countries in order to achieve its interests and political and economic goals, and a card that Tehran uses to improve its negotiating position with these countries.

This is what it is currently doing with France, as the mullahs’ regime in Tehran is working to exploit the issue of the French-Iranian researcher Freiba Adlkhah who has been held in Iranian prisons since June 2019, to achieve this goal.

Iranian intransigence and French attempts

After the arrest of the French researcher in Tehran, French President Emmanuel Macron announced that her arrest was unacceptable, calling on the authorities to release her, and several attempts were made by the French consulate to communicate with Adlkhah, which the Iranian authorities rejected.

They claimed that she did not recognize dual nationals and that Adlkhah is an Iranian citizen, and the French consulate is not entitled to communicate with her, which prompted Paris on December 27, 2019 to summon the Iranian ambassador to Bahram Qasimi to protest the arrest of two French academics, namely the Iranian-French researcher and French researcher Roland Marshall.

The French Foreign Ministry announced in a statement after summoning the Iranian ambassador, that it had requested Qasimi for the immediate release of its citizens, and for the Iranian authorities to show total transparency about their situation, and to allow communication with the aforementioned, especially after it announced that Adelkhah had entered a hunger strike.

Since the arrest of the French researcher, Tehran refuses to clarify the reasons for her arrest, and therefore Paris continues efforts to obtain clarification of the reasons, and she sent a message from her prison on December 24, 2019, in which she indicated that she was subjected to psychological torture, and many of her basic rights were violated, and that her arrest came because of her research work.

Adlkhah is a researcher at the Institute of Political Studies in Paris, and director of research at the International Research Center at the University of Science in Paris, and specializes in Shiite doctrine, and was arrested in June 2019, by the intelligence forces of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, after a short time from her arrival in Iran.

Iranian maneuver

Ahmed Qabal, a researcher specializing in Iranian affairs at the Al-Ahram Center for Political and Strategic Studies, explains that it has become clear that the timing of the arrest of the French researcher in June 2019 was a maneuver from the Iranian Revolutionary Guards to pressure France to do more efforts for reducing US sanctions on Iran that have burdened the Iranian economy and started to have repercussions for the ordinary citizen, and can push them towards an uprising that does not believe in the policies of the regime.

Qabal, in a statement to the Reference, pointed out that since the arrest of the French researcher, the Iranian regime has deliberately refused to access France, on the pretext that Iranian laws do not allow this, just as Tehran has repeatedly rejected the request to release her, and has attached a series of accusations of espionage and working to overthrow the system.

The goals of the mullahs

Qabal pointed out that despite the French efforts that were made in the last period in cooperation with the parties to the nuclear agreement to reduce the severity of the American sanctions and enable the Iranian regime to overcome the effects of the sanctions, Tehran evaded some of its nuclear obligations and gradually evacuated the rates specified for uranium enrichment.

As a result, he added, it was expected that Tehran would return the favor with the release of the French researcher, but the ceiling of Iranian ambitions and bargains are endless, especially as Tehran understands the sensitivity of this file to public opinion and the French government, but Paris in turn is trying by hinting at a diplomatic crisis to pressure Tehran to end this file.