Tehran, Iran – Iran’s Foreign Ministry announced on Monday that it had summoned the French ambassador to Tehran to formally protest what it called “interference in Iran’s internal affairs” by two French diplomats who were briefly detained earlier this month. At his weekly press conference, ministry spokesman Esmail Baghaei stated, “Yesterday, the French ambassador to Tehran was summoned to the Foreign Ministry, where it was emphasized that the French government must put an end to these practices and this interference in Iran’s internal affairs under misleading pretexts.” He added that the diplomats “interfered in Iran’s internal affairs under the guise of engaging with civil society,” asserting that their activities “cannot be justified in any way under the 1961 Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations.”
This escalation comes against the backdrop of developments that took place on July 20, when French Foreign Minister Jean-Noël Barrot announced that Iranian officials had targeted French diplomats the day before they were subjected to a “very serious act of intimidation” by the security services of the Islamic Republic.
The French minister explained that the diplomats were detained “for several hours without cause, interrogated, and one of them was physically assaulted” before they were finally able to leave the place of detention and return safely to the French embassy in the Iranian capital, amid escalating tension in diplomatic relations between the two countries over these issues.
