An Iranian court sentenced Benjamin Brière, a Frenchman, to eight years in prison on spying charges on Tuesday. His Paris-based lawyer has denounced the trial as a "masquerade".
Brière, who was arrested in May 2020 while travelling in Iran and is currently on hunger strike, was also given an additional eight-month sentence for propaganda against Iran's Islamic system, his lawyer Philippe Valent said in a statement.
The 36-year-old Frenchman was on an overland trip across Asia when he was arrested in May 2020 near the Turkmenistan-Iran border and accused of spying.
Slamming the trial, which began on Thursday, as a "masquerade", Valent said his client "did not have a fair trial in front of impartial judges" and noted he had not been allowed to access the full indictment against him.
"This verdict is the result of a purely political process that is... devoid of any basis," he added.
The French foreign ministry has also slammed the sentencing, calling it “unacceptable” and not based on facts.
Brière’s Iranian lawyer Saeid Dehghan said his client had been sentenced on new charges and had not been informed about them.
"His sentence is based on a different legal clause than the earlier one ... He has been convicted for cooperation with hostile states against Iran which carries a longer sentence than his previous one," said Dehghan. "He was not informed about this new charge and our defence in the past 20 months while he was in jail, did not address it."
Dehghan said his team would appeal the verdict within 20 days.
Brière had been travelling around Iran in a van, hoping to explore the country’s roads as he had done on similar trips around Scandinavia, the Balkans and Turkey. The journey, which he was documenting via Instagram, came to an abrupt halt when he was arrested by Iranian security forces in a deserted zone near the border with Turkmenistan.
In an interview with FRANCE 24 earlier this year, his sister, Blandine Brière, denied her brother was engaged in any spying activity. “He was just a tourist, and nothing can justify the fact that he has spent so much time in prison for no reason and with so little contact with his family," she said. “There is no valid reason to keep him where he is. It’s wrongful confinement."
His lawyer on Tuesday said Brière was "more and more weakened" by a hunger strike that has now lasted a month.
"It is not tolerable that Benjamin Brière is being held a hostage to negotiations by a regime which keeps a French citizen arbitrarily detained merely to use him as currency in an exchange," Valent added.
‘Hostage diplomacy’ accusations
Brière is one of more than a dozen Western citizens held in Iran, described as hostages by activists who say they are innocent of any crime and detained at the behest of the powerful Revolutionary Guards to extract concessions from the West.
Nationals of all three European powers involved in the talks on the Iranian nuclear programme – Britain, France and Germany – are among the foreigners being held.
NGOs have accused Iran of trapping foreign nationals in its jails as a form of ‘hostage diplomacy’, meaning they can be used as bargaining chips in negotiations with foreign powers. In recent years, Iran has agreed to hostage exchanges with countries, including France.
Currently under house arrest, Franco-Iranian Fariba Adelkhah was originally detained in Iran in 2019 and sentenced in May 2020 to five years in prison for attacks on national security. When her French partner, Roland Marchal, visited her in Iran in 2019, he was also arrested and imprisoned.
However, Marchal was released in March 2020, at the same time that France released Iranian engineer Jalal Rohollahnejad, who the US was trying to extradite for violating American sanctions against Iran.
(FRANCE 24 with AFP)
