Belgian Detained In Iran As Brussels Mulls Controversial Prisoner-Swap Treaty With Tehran

Belgian Detained In Iran As Brussels Mulls Controversial Prisoner-Swap Treaty With Tehran

Radio Free Europe- July 5th 2022

ran has been holding a Belgian man for the past four months on “espionage” charges, Belgium’s justice minister has said, as the country considers a controversial treaty with Tehran.

The man was seized in Iran on February 24 and has been in “illegal” detention since, Justice Minister Vincent Van Quickenborne told Belgian lawmakers without identifying him. Some reports suggested that Iran had arrested an former NGO worker.

Quickenborne said officials from Belgium’s embassy in Tehran had twice visited the jailed man to give all possible assistance, and that his family had earlier on July 5 made public his detention.

“I cannot say more, at the express request of the family,” the minister said.

His comments came as Belgium’s parliament is set to debate whether to ratify a proposed treaty with Iran that could allow an Iranian diplomat serving a 20-year sentence for plotting a bomb attack outside Paris to be sent back to Tehran.

The treaty has been criticized by opposition lawmakers and lawyers for a dissident Iranian group, who say it would pave the way for Assadollah Assadi, convicted of terror charges and sentenced in February 2021, to be repatriated.

The treaty’s text “is tailored to Assadi”, opposition deputy Georges Dallemagne said.

Assadi was found guilty of attempted terrorism after a plot to bomb a rally of the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI), an exiled opposition group, near Paris in June 2018. The NCRI is the political wing of the exiled Iranian opposition group Mujahedin-e Khalq Organization (MKO or MEK), an exiled opposition group that is seeking to overthrow the Islamic republic.

Dallemagne predicted the Belgian government would present any release of Assadi as a “humanitarian operation,” a trade for a Swedish-Iranian academic, Ahmadreza Djalali, who is being held in Iran under sentence of death.

Djalali was accused of providing information to Israel to help it assassinate several senior nuclear scientists. He taught at a Brussels university. However, it is not clear if he would be covered by the treaty as he doesn’t have Belgian nationality.