French-Iranian Academic Fariba Adelkhah Arrested and Sent Back to Evin Prison

Kazem Gharib-Abadi, Deputy Minister for International Affairs of the Judiciary, announced that French-Iranian academic Fariba Adelkhah was sent back to Evin Prison from house arrest due a breach of electronic tag rules.

According to HRANA, the news agency of Human Rights Activists, quoting ISNA, Adelkhah was arrested by security forces at her home in Tehran on June 7, 2019. Her colleague Roland Marchal, who had travelled to Iran in order to visit Adelkhah, was also arrested upon arrival at the Tehran Airport. On March 20, 2020, in a prisoner swap agreement, Marshal was released from jail and returned Paris in exchange for Jalal Ruhollah-Nejad, who was jailed in France.

In May 2020, Branch 15 of the Revolutionary Court of Tehran sentenced Adelkhah to six and a half years in prison on the charge of “propaganda against the regime” and “assembly and collusion against national security”. The verdict was upheld on appeal. Five years of imprisonment is enforceable per Article 134 of the Islamic Penal Code, which states that  from several verdicts, only the severest is enforceable.

She was transferred from Evin Prison to Ward 209, at the disposal of the Ministry of Intelligence, on September 17, 2020, for unknown reasons and despite being already convicted. On October 3, 2020, she was released from jail to spend the rest of her sentence on house arrest with an electronic tag.

Fariba Adelkhah is a French-Iranian anthropologist who graduated from University Marc Bloch in Strasbourg and the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences. She has been working for years as a researcher at the Centre for International Research of the Paris Institute of Political Studies (Sciences Po). She has authored several books.