Europe 1 with AFP 11:14, December 27, 2021
Detained since May 2020, Frenchman Benjamin Brière is accused of "espionage" by the Iranian authorities.
His family announced on Monday that he was going on a hunger strike to protest his conditions of detention.
In Iran, espionage can sometimes be punishable by death.
Benjamin Brière, a Frenchman detained in Iran for more than a year and a half for "espionage", has started a hunger strike to protest against his conditions of detention, his family told AFP on Monday.
Mr. Brière, 36, who has always presented himself as a tourist and denies the accusations of espionage, was arrested in May 2020 for having taken "photographs of prohibited areas" with a recreational drone in a natural park in Iran, according to his lawyer.
"Taken hostage for no reason"
"Benjamin started the hunger strike on December 25 because he was not allowed to call us for the Christmas holidays, but also to denounce the mistreatment he has suffered for twenty months," said his sister Blandine to AFP.
Mr. Brière is being held in Valikabad prison, in Mashhad, in northeastern Iran.
"He sees no change in his situation," she lamented.
Arrested on a tourist trip
According to Ms. Brière, he was arrested in May 2020 while crossing Iran as a tourist, during a long trip in a campervan that began in 2018. Last May, his Iranian lawyer had indicated that Mr. Brière would be tried for "espionage" and "propaganda" against the political system of the Islamic Republic of Iran.
Espionage carries the death penalty in this country.
The French Foreign Ministry deemed these accusations "incomprehensible".
"He is being taken hostage for no reason. It's completely illegal, we don't know anything. Benjamin needs more French diplomacy," added Ms. Brière.
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Iran retains more than a dozen Western passport holders, most of them binational, which NGOs condemn as a hostage-taking policy designed to obtain concessions from foreign powers. In recent years, the Islamic Republic has carried out several exchanges of detainees with foreign countries. Mr. Brière is the only known Westerner detained in Iran who does not have an Iranian passport.
Franco-Iranian researcher Fariba Adelkhah has been detained since June 2019 and was sentenced in May 2020 to five years in prison for attacks on national security.
She has been under house arrest since October 2020. Her companion Roland Marchal, also a researcher, had been detained with her before being released in March 2020, after Paris freed the Iranian engineer Jallal Rohollahnejad, whose the United States claimed the extradition for violating US sanctions against Iran.