the court on charges linked to post-vote protests
France has called for the "immediate release" of a French lecturer and a Franco-Iranian employee at its Tehran embassy who are being tried in an Iranian court.
Paris considered the charges against 24-year-old Clotilde Reiss "devoid of any foundation" and those against embassy staffer Nazak Afshar to be "non-existent", the foreign ministry said in a statement on Saturday.
France also objected to the fact that their embassy had not been informed in advance that they would be appearing in court, "in conformity with international rules and consular protection," the statement added.
The ministry said it deplored the fact that neither of them had been represented by a lawyer in court.
Reiss and Afshar were among more than 10 other defendants brought before the court for a mass hearing on charges related to huge protests that erupted across Iran after Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the Iranian president, was declared winner of the June 12 election.
Reiss' father, Remi, said: "She does not have any involvement in the region ... Of course she is innocent."
"She has nothing to reproach herself for and nobody can reproach her about anything."
Afshar's son said his mother had been coerced into making false confessions: "They forced a confession out of her. She is not an activist, this is not a political person at all.
"Her computer was confiscated two weeks ago and she was arrested by intelligence agents on the eve of her departure to France. They lured her out of the door by saying they had come to return the computer."
Naimian said he hoped his 50-year-old mother, a secretary in the cultural section of the French embassy, would be freed due to French pressure, stressing that she had taken French nationality. Read more here....
Source: Al Jazeera (English)
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