On 1 July, 24-year-old French national Clotilde Reiss was detained at Tehran airport in Iran, on her way home to France. She is accused of espionage in connection with photographs she took during a demonstration in June, which she emailed to a friend. Clotilde Reiss is believed to be a prisoner of conscience, held solely for peacefully exercising her right to receive and impart information and ideas.
Clotilde Reiss, a graduate politics student from the city of Lille in France, travelled to Iran after receiving a scholarship for her studies on Iran. She was about to return home via Lebanon, after five months working as an assistant teacher in Esfahan University in central Iran. Clotilde Reiss is held in Evin Prison in Tehran. She was allowed to phone a French diplomat and said that she was being interrogated daily, though she was not being ill-treated. Clotilde Reiss does not yet have a lawyer.
