Several rallies took place Wednesday in France in support of Cécile Kohler and Jacques Paris, detained in Iran for three years for three years, while President Emmanuel Macron assured act “tirelessly” to release these two nationals.
Professor of 40 -year -old letters, Cécile Kohler, from eastern France, and her septuagenarian companion Jacques Paris had been arrested on May 7, 2022, on the last day of a tourist trip to Iran.
Accused of “spying” by the Iranian authorities, considered as “state hostages” by Paris, they are officially the last two French people imprisoned in Iran, which holds around twenty Westerners.
They are currently incarcerated in the sinister section 209, reserved for political prisoners, from the prison of Evin de Tehran.
In Paris, some 200 people including the sister and parents of Cécile Kohler, met to demand the liberation of the two French, very psychologically affected.
Their “arbitrary” detention and the “prison relentlessness of which they are the victims, which is more like their complete innocence and the flagrant absurdity of pronounced charges, are of unbearable brutality,” said Noémie Kohler, Cécile’s sister.
“We will never give up” and “we expect today from France that it takes on everything to obtain their release,” she added, expressing her “despair” in the face of the total absence of “concrete advance” until then.
Alongside other former French detainees in Iran, Olivier Rumbleau, released on March 17 after more than two years in the Iranian jails, delivered a long applauded testimony, calling for maximum mobilization to put pressure on Tehran.
“I was there, now I am here. I ask that Cécile and that Jacques, from now on, we see them. Let us light the TV (…) and that we read the number of days of torture. 1095 days today, 1096 tomorrow,” said the young man.
“Hostages that we forget, that’s exactly what their kidnappers want,” he said. “The Iranian government is afraid that we would say the words that describe the situation of Cécile and Jacques (…) The words of headband, the words of prohibition of visit, of confessions under the constraint, of justice to the orders”.
– “Keep the blow” –
-Paris has promised to do everything for their release, in vain until then. Between 2023 and 2025, at least five French people were released, after months or years of detention, but Cécile Kohler and Jacques Paris hold the sad record of three complete years of incarceration, including three months in total isolation.
“They were arrested without foundation” and are “imprisoned (…) in inhuman conditions which are torture”, denounced on Wednesday the chief of French diplomacy Jean-Noël Barrot in a video posted on X, again exhorting the French not to go to Iran “so as not to take the risk of being themselves arbitrarily detained”.
Forced to “forced confessions” broadcast on Iranian state television a few months after their arrest, the two French are subject to extremely hard conditions of imprisonment.
Light lit 24 hours a day, 30 minutes outing two or three times a week, rare and short calls under close surveillance to their relatives, the last date of April 14.
In three years, they have only received four consular visits, and almost no information filters on legal proceedings.
“Cécile and Jacques are more and more desperate and believe it less and less,” Noémie Kohler told AFP on Tuesday, when they have no contact with the outside.
Paris announced its intention to file a complaint against Tehran before the International Court of Justice for “violation” of their rights “in the coming days”, according to the Quai d’Orsay.
European chancelleries accuse Tehran of practicing “hostage diplomacy” in particular to weigh in the very sensitive discussions on Iranian nuclear, in the deadlock for years, and obtain a lifting of sanctions.
In total, around forty rallies were planned in France to mark this anniversary date. About 150 people gathered in Strasbourg in support of Cécile Kohler, from Alsace and Jacques Paris. On the ground, a red cord materialized the 8m2 that several prisoners share.
They were dozens also in Lille. “We hope that Cécile and Jacques know (…) that they have this support and we know that it is precious to them” to “hold on”, explained Solène Jabaud, a participant.
