“Mr. President, I am writing to you today to ask you to use all diplomatic means necessary to obtain his release”.
Here is the request sent by Benjamin Brière's sister to Emmanuel Macron, Monday, May 24, in an open letter, of which France 24 was able to take note.
The 35-year-old French national has been detained in Iran since May 2020. He is imprisoned in the northeast of the Islamic Republic for “propaganda against the system” and “espionage” - crimes punishable respectively, in Iran, by lashes and the death penalty.
For his relatives and his lawyers, the French national was in Iran only for tourism.
Today, they are getting impatient and denounce “procedures that are not transparent”.
“We had very little direct contact, four calls in a year, the last of which dates back to two days,” explains Blandine Brière, contacted by France 24. “My brother's morale has its ups and downs, the wait is very long, it is hard for him, even if he is well treated on the spot. It's also very hard for us: we don't have a deadline, we don't know why he's been there, in prison, for a year ”.
At the time of his arrest, Benjamin Brière "was visiting a national park in northeastern Iran," said his sister. "These accusations against him are unfounded: of course he is not a secret agent, it was just a tourist who was walking over there. ”His French lawyer, Me Philippe Valent, added to France 24:“ This is all absurd, it's hallucinating. Benjamin had fitted out his van to make a round the world - his Instagram account recounts his journey almost day after day in Iran - so his coverage would be pretty lousy if he was a French agent! ”
Van trip interrupted in Iran
Benjamin Brière's publications on the social network are, in fact, a logbook of his many trips, a journey that began in June 2018 from Paris.
Before arriving in the Islamic Republic at the end of December 2019, the French national identified himself in several countries: Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, several Balkan countries, Turkey or Iraq.
The last post on his newsfeed dates back to May 26, 2020, in Iran, where he is seen posing sitting in a hammock, facing the sun and surrounded by nature.
"He was in this desert area, but controlled, because he was preparing to leave Iran soon to go to Turkmenistan", according to his lawyer Me Valent.
The French Ministry of Foreign Affairs confirmed, after the publication of an article in Le Point last February, that the French national was detained in Iran and that he “enjoys” as such “the consular protection provided for by the Convention of Vienna, April 24, 1963 ”- this makes it possible in particular to visit the detained person and ensure a link with his relatives.
This guarantee does not seem, however, more satisfactory today for those close to Benjamin Brière.
“A year after his arrest, we have no procedural documents and do not distinguish any progress”, writes his sister in her open letter addressed to the President of the Republic.
“The Iranian authorities are placing the matter in total obscurantism.
We are powerless in the face of a scenario as unreal as it is incomprehensible. ”
“We're just a lambda family overwhelmed by all this”
Me Valent supports this finding of incomprehension: according to him, “Benjamin and his family today have the feeling of a form of isolation, of a total opacity, the only consular visits do not reassure anyone in the current Iranian context ”.
For the criminal lawyer, as for Blandine Brière, the French national incarcerated in the central prison vakilabad of Machhad is above all “instrumentalized in something which exceeds him”.
“It is obvious that these Iranian legal proceedings are not the reasons for this interminable wait,” writes the sister of the French national to Emmanuel Macron.
“The stake is elsewhere, my brother finds himself being an instrument of negotiations which exceeds him.
A young Frenchman finds himself at the center of conflicts between countries, which obviously escapes him. ”
In the unresolved cases between Paris and Tehran, Benjamin Brière is added to that of another national, the Franco-Iranian researcher Fariba Adelkhah.
The latter was arrested in June 2019 in Tehran, then sentenced, in May 2020, to five years in prison for "collusion with a view to attacking national security" and "propaganda against the political system".
After 16 months of detention, she is now under house arrest.
French researcher Roland Marchal was released in March 2020 - he had been imprisoned in Iran since June 2019 on suspicion of spying by the authorities - after an agreement reached between Paris and Tehran on a prisoner exchange, the Iranian engineer Jalal Ruhollahnejad having been released in return.
Could the case of Benjamin Brière meet the same fate? The possibility of an exchange was, in fact, raised last March between the French national and Fariba Adelkhah, on the one hand, and Assadollah Assadi, an Iranian diplomat sentenced to twenty years in prison in Belgium, on the other. "When an arrest becomes political, it can take time for a release, a negotiation is set up and it goes beyond the simple framework which led to the arrest of the person", explains Thierry Coville, researcher at the Institute of international and strategic relations specialist in Iran, contacted by France 24.
For this specialist, the cases of Benjamin Brière (a tourist), Fariba Adelkhah and Roland Marchal (researchers) are "particular". "But what is true is that we are in a climate in Iran where the forces controlling the country have more and more a security logic," he continues. "Relations with the West are marked by power struggles (...), and since the United States' exit from the Iran nuclear deal in 2018, radical forces have taken a little more power and further justified their security approach. "
“We are just an average family overwhelmed by all this, which does not want Benjamin to be an instrument of negotiation between countries,” says Blandine Brière.
In her open letter, she simply calls “for the help” of the highest authority of the French state “in order to free Benjamin, today cut off from his own life, from those who love him, and the rest. of the world."
"Since his arrest, we have been following the situation of our compatriot with attention," explains a diplomatic source from the Quai d'Orsay, contacted by France 24. She specifies that under the consular protection granted to Benjamin Brière, "regular contacts are maintained with him by our embassy in Tehran. "
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