Iran Arrests Two More French Citizens As West Increases Pressure
Paris says the number of French nationals detained by the Islamic Republic of Iran has reached seven with the arrest of two more citizens.
Paris says the number of French nationals detained by the Islamic Republic of Iran has reached seven with the arrest of two more citizens.
French Foreign Minister Catherine Colonna said on Saturday that Paris is concerned over the incarceration of two other citizens urging Tehran to immediately release them and provide them with consular protection.
Colonna made the comments in an interview with Le Parisien newspaper about the new development, which would seemingly bring about a further deterioration in mutual relations.
She reminded the Islamic Republic of its international obligations warning the if the goal behind the detention is to blackmail France, “then it cannot work.”
Human rights organizations accuse Iran of a systematic policy of hostage taking over four decades from the earliest period of the Islamic republic after the ouster of the Shah, starting with the 1979-1981 siege at the US embassy in Tehran.
Tehran denies any policy of hostage taking and insists all foreigners are arrested and tried according to legal process. However, it has frequently shown readiness for prisoner exchanges and participated in swaps in the past.
Most trials of political cases, including detained Western detainees are without due process of law and based on trumped up charges.
In her interview, Colonna however noted that her Iranian counterpart Hossein Amir-Abdollahian “has committed to respect the prisoners’ right of access.”
Her comments come a day after French President Emmanuel Macron expressed solidarity with Iranian freedom-seeking protesters calling their movement a “revolution”.
In early October, France accused the Iranian regime of “dictatorial practices” after Iran’s state TV aired the forced confessions of two French nationals arrested in the Middle Eastern country ruled by its 83-year-old anti-West ruler, Ali Khamenei.
In the video of the forced confessions, one of the two French nationals - Cecile Kohler - said they were in Iran to “prepare the ground for the revolution and the overthrow of the regime of Islamic Iran.”
Iran’s state media are infamous for purported confessions by prisoners in politically charged cases. Such prisoners are held without due process of law and usually cannot choose their own defense attorney.
On Friday, Le Figaro newspaper reported that the two nationals had been arrested prior to the start of anti-government protests in September over the death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini.
Ties between France and Iran have soured recently as efforts to revive 2015 nuclear talks in which Paris is one of the parties have come to a standstill.
Following the uprising against their authoritarian government after killing of Amini in police custody, the EU imposed new sanctions on Iran following similar measures by the United States, Canada and Britain.
A new round of European Union sanctions for human rights violations by Tehran will also be approved at a foreign ministers' meeting on Monday, two diplomats told Reuters.
The sanctions are set to target 31 individuals and entities and would freeze their assets and imposing travel bans.
“France has also proposed new designations for those who would sell drones to Iran and to sanction people involved in the export of electronic components for drones,” one of the diplomats said.
The identity of the two new French detainees was not immediately clear, but Cecile Kohler and Jacques Paris, whose confessions earlier aired on the Iranian TV, have been arbitrarily detained since May 2022.
Fariba Adelkhah, is another Iranian-born woman, who was arrested in 2019 and sentenced to five years in prison for “undermining national security.” Benjamin Briere was similarly arrested in May 2020 and sentenced to eight years and eight months for espionage, without due process of law.
The crisis in health care is just one aspect of the overall economic crisis, precipitated by a centralized and often mismanaged economy, and for the past years, US sanctions.
Most medicines in Iran are produced locally by quasi-governmental companies that import the raw material from other countries. When the Iranian currency began to lose value in early 2018, the government offered a fixed exchange rate for essential goods, mainly food and medicines. However, earlier this year, the new administration of President Ebrahim Raisi eliminated what was in fact a government subsidy. Now, food and medicine producers must buy dollars at rates seven times higher to import their raw materials, which has disrupted production.
Deputy chairman of pharmaceuticals producers, Ali Fatemi told Aftab News in Tehran that when an economic sector is controlled by the government and is managed according to “a command economy” it is not surprising that a situation like the current shortage would emerge. The government sets unreasonably low prices and then stops subsidies, which makes it impossible for its companies to but raw materials and produce, he said.
To partially alleviate the shortage, the Iranian government allows medicines, such as antibiotics and simple cough syrups to be imported from India, Fatemi explained, and as a result the country spends much more foreign currency, instead of importing the raw materials.
Apart from pharmaceuticals, inflationary recession has gripped other sectors, according to Fararu website in Tehran. As prices have risen at least by 40 percent for two consecutive years, consumers have lost their purchasing power and demand has fallen. This has led to a “domino effect for producers and factories” that must stop operations. This in turn creates more unemployment and less consumer demand.
Iran’s currency has fallen by more than 15 percent since early September when it became clear that a nuclear agreement with West was not a realistic expectation.
Since early 2018, when the United States signaled its intention to withdraw from the 2015 nuclear deal known as the JCPOA, Iran’s rial has fallen tenfold from 35,000 to the dollar to 350,000 on November 12. When the US did withdraw from the accord in May of that year, it imposed damaging oil and banking sanction on Iran. This further devalued the rial and led to very high inflation, which coupled with the inefficiencies of a government-controlled economy, has impoverished tens of millions of people.
Ehsan Soltani, an economist in Iran told the website that while food prices have risen eightfold since 2018, wages, at most, have increased threefold.
“In recent years with rising inflation, economists warned officials about ‘inflationary recession’, but the government did not pay attention at all,” Soltani explained.
In fact, from cautious statements by many officials, especially in the previous Iranian government headed by President Hassan Rouhani, it was apparent that they were aware of the dire situation, but they had no control over the country’s foreign policy, which had brough about crippling US sanctions.
But Iran’s 83-year-old anti-Western ruler, Ali Khamenei, has the last word on foreign policy and only he could allow a new nuclear deal to be signed that would lift the most damaging sanctions.
Iran’s economic growth in the past decade has been zero and Soltani compared Iran to its neighbor Turkey. “Just look at Turkey…and see the high rate of growth it has achieved in the past ten years, adding tremendously to its foreign currency revenues, while we have faced economic and infrastructure decay.”