March 20, 2016
A former employee of the French embassy in Tehran has been arrested at Imam Khomeini Airport after arriving in Iran to visit her critically ill mother, the opposition website Kaleme reported Saturday.
She is the third dual national known to have been arrested in the eight weeks since the nuclear agreement took effect in January and since Iran freed four Iranian-Americans that month. The latest arrest points to a growing threat to dual nationals visiting Iran.
Nazak Afshar, 58, who has French-Iranian citizenship, had previously been arrested in 2009 on charges of spying and of acting against Iran’s national security. Although she was put on trial at the time, no verdict was issued and she was freed following the intervention of the French government. She left Iran for France that same year.
This month, Afshar returned to Iran to visit her mother after “doctors had given up hope of her recovery,” the website said, without giving details of the ailment.
The potential opening up to the West after last year’s nuclear deal has alarmed Iranian hardliners and the arrest of Afshar and the detention of other people with dual citizenship appears to be part of a crackdown on what hardliners have called Western “infiltration.”
Last month, Baquer Namazi, an 80-year-old Iranian-American living in Tehran, was arrested and jailed along with his son, Siamak Namazi, also a dual US-Iranian citizen, who had been imprisoned in October, after the nuclear agreement had been reached but before it went into effect.
An Iranian-British former BBC journalist, Bahman Daroshafaei, was also detained in February, but was released on bail three weeks later. He had returned to Iran a few years ago.
Officials have yet to announce charges against any of them, but Iran’s Judiciary spokesman said last month that most of the detained dual nationals face espionage charges.
Meanwhile, a federal judge in Washington, DC, said it was illegal for the French embassy there to fire a Muslim employee when she got pregnant.
Saima Ashraf-Hassan is a Pakistan-born French citizen who moved to the United States a few months after the September 11 terrorist attacks in 2001.
She took a job at the French Embassy where she said her co-workers harassed her, called her a “terrorist” and told her she couldn’t wear a headscarf at work.
She said when she told her supervisor she was pregnant, the embassy fired her. She sued the French Embassy for discrimination and a federal judge has now ruled in her favor.
“This may be the only time a US court has extended the reach of the civil rights laws to extend to a foreign citizen, working for a foreign government on foreign soil at an embassy here in DC,” said Ashraf-Hassan’s attorney, Ari Wilkenfeld.
Katie Atkinson represented Ashraf-Hassan on the issue of sovereign immunity and says because her job didn’t have anything to do with the government, sovereign immunity didn’t apply. “Her job was to oversee the intern program. It had nothing to do with French government policy or law,” Atkinson said.