Frenchman Benjamin Briere was arrested some 10 months ago. He entered Iran on a tourist visa, after driving all the way from France in a van. He was arrested in May 2020 in northeastern Iran near the border with Turkmenistan, where, according to his lawyer, he was operating a remote-controlled mini helicopter, or helicam, used to take nature photos.
Authorities are holding Briere at a prison in the northeast city of Mashhad, the lawyer Saeid Dehghan said in a tweet. Prosecutors recently added the propaganda charges to the original accusation of spying. Under Iranian law, a spying conviction can lead to up to 10 years in prison.
This is Benjamin Briere, the French tourist on trial in Mashhad for (heaven forbid) taking photographs and posting a comment on social media about compulsory hijab. The latest victim of a long list of foreigners held hostage by #Iran https://t.co/lc6PB5Rrgz
— Kylie Moore-Gilbert (@KMooreGilbert) March 15, 2021
Five-year sentence
On Sunday, prominent British-Iranian dual national Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe reappeared in a Tehran court to face similar accusations of spreading propaganda after completing her full five-year prison sentence. She remains in Iran awaiting the verdict, unable to fly home to London.
The cases come as Iran escalates pressure on the United States and European powers, including France and Britain, to lift sanctions imposed due to breaches of the nuclear accord with world powers.
.@SecBlinken: Iran’s moving in the wrong direction. It continues to take steps that lift the various constraints of the agreement and is making its program more dangerous, not less dangerous. We want to see Iran come back into compliance with its obligations. pic.twitter.com/jX4XXVZrWd
— Department of State (@StateDept) March 7, 2021
While former President Donald Trump unilaterally walked away from the landmark nuclear deal with Iran in May 2018 and reimposed harsh sanctions on the country, President Joe Biden has offered to join in talks toward restoring the deal. But Washington and Tehran have reached an impasse, with each insisting the other move first to revive the deal.
Before her release into house arrest, Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe was held in Tehran's notorious Evin Prison, the same jail as Australian academic Kylie Moore-Gilbert.
In the first interview after her release on 25 November 2020, Moore-Gilbert says she was beaten and injected with a tranquilliser while being held in the Iranian jail for more than two years.
Her time in prison included seven months in solitary confinement.
The practice of placing detainees in prolonged solitary confinement is widespread in Iran. It is routinely used during the interrogation stage to isolate detainees and to weaken them psychologically in order to extract information and false “confessions.” https://t.co/m9BqSuPc3Q
— Kylie Moore-Gilbert (@KMooreGilbert) March 12, 2021
Prisoner exchanges
Rights groups accuse hard-liners in Iran’s security agencies of using foreign detainees as bargaining chips for money or influence in negotiations with the West.
Tehran denies such motivation, but there have been prisoner exchanges in the past.
In March last year, two French academics held in Iran went on trial, accused of plotting "acts against national security".
French-Iranian Fariba Adelkhah and Frenchman Roland Marchal, both researchers at Sciences Po University in Paris, were detained by the Islamic Republic in June 2019.
This issue of @CritiqueIntle is wholeheartedly dedicated to Fariba Adelkhah. It is a call for her unconditional liberation.
— Free Fariba Adelkhah (@FaribaRoland) March 11, 2021
Read the contributions by Béatrice Hibou, Assia Boutaleb, Jean-Louis Briquet, Adam Baczko, Marie Vannetzel. #FreeFariba https://t.co/w7PI693gay
Marchal was eventually swapped against Iranian engineer Jalal Ruhollahnejad on 20 March 2020 but Adelkhah was sentenced to 6 years, an outcome "utterly condemned" by the French government.
In a speech on 24 February for the UN Human Rights Council, French Minister of Foreign Affairs Jean-Yves Le Drian reiterated France's demand that Adelkhah be freed.
