French-Iranian professor Fariba Adelkhah was released from an Iranian prison on Friday. The French Ministry of Foreign Affairs let know happy with this decision. Adelkhah – like a “considerable number” of other prisoners – was said to have been pardoned in honor of the Iranian Revolution that took place 44 years ago. Adelkhah’s lawyer tells AFP news agency that it is still unclear how long the anthropologist, who teaches at the Sciences Politiques University in Paris, will have to stay in Iran before she can travel back to France.
Adelkhah was arrested in 2019 when she visited Iran. In May 2020, she was sentenced to five years in prison for allegedly posing a “threat to national security”. According to the French government, her arrest was politically motivated and she was unjustly detained. Paris asked for her release several times.
The professor is one of seven French imprisoned in Iran, which has worsened relations between Paris and Tehran. According to supporters of Western prisoners, Iran’s totalitarian regime uses innocent people as bargaining chips in negotiations. The regime denies that.
The Iranian regime celebrated the 44th anniversary of the Islamic Republic on Saturday with, among other things, a military parade. The president gave a speech, which was briefly interrupted on television by a protest by a hacker group. Their logo appeared and a voice shouted: “Death to the Islamic Republic!” Protests against the conservative regime have been going on in the country for five months, which began when 22-year-old Mahsa Amini died in police custody.