France/Iran

French student on spy charges released on bail

Article published on the 2009-08-17 Latest update 2009-08-18 09:02 TU

Clotilde Reiss in court last week
(Photo: Reuters)

Iran has released French student Clotilde Reiss on bail after she spent six weeks in Tehran’s notorious Evin prison. Reiss had been accused of spying during last month's Iranian presidential elections.

Reiss was in good health and spirits, according to a French statement, and would await her verdict in the French embassy in Tehran. The French government had posted the bail for the release of the 24-year-old, who immediately spoke with President Nicolas Sarkozy afterwards.

Reiss’ father Rémi told RFI that he had managed to speak to his daughter today, and had only spoken to his daughter twice over her detention.

“She’s good,” he says, “we talked about what she did yesterday. She left the jail at the end of the day with a French representative from the jail, they took her to the embassy and they had a sort of reception there.”

Reiss was arrested in Tehran on 1 July as she was trying to fly out of Iran after completing her study trip. She was working as a university teaching assistant in Iran’s third-largest city, Isfahan, and was one of more than 100 defendants at a televised mass trial earlier this month.

Iranian authorities accuse Reiss of espionage and assisting a Western plot to destabilise the government of the Islamic republic. The spy charges rest on allegations she attended demonstrations, emailed friends and sent a report to a French institute for Iranian studies during the protests against the June presidential elections.  

During her trial, Reiss admitting to having made mistakes and asked for “the forgiveness of the country, the people, and the Iranian court.”

The French government has strongly condemned the trial, with Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner telling the media the accusations were “highly delusional” and that the two women were “guilty of absolutely nothing at all”.

Yann Richard, a lecturer in Iranian studies at the Sorbonne Nouvelle University, says that although Reiss’ case needed to be dealt with it should not have been an affair of state.

“By giving too much importance to her case,” says Richard, “we fuelled the suspicions that the Iranian government wanted to promote to the Iranian people; that Clotilde Reiss was on a mission for the French authorities, which obviously wasn’t the case.”

France has demanded that her case, and that against a Franco-Iranian embassy worker released earlier, be thrown out.