French Foreign Minister Jean-Noel Barrot on Tuesday announced two Iranian diplomats would be expelled from France. The move comes in retaliation for incident last month in Tehran in which two French diplomats were arrested. File Photo by Radek Pietruszka/EPA
Aug. 18 (UPI) — France will expel two Iranian diplomats in retaliation for an attack on a pair of French diplomats in Tehran in July, French Foreign Minister Jean-Noël Barrot said Tuesday.
After first telling a French regional newspaper group of his plans, Barrot confirmed the story with a social media post in which he declared, “I had announced that this intolerable act would be followed by consequences. It has been done.
“Two Iranian diplomats in France will be expelled in the coming days.”
The move deepens the standoff between Paris and Tehran over the July 19 incident, in which France says Iranian agents “deliberately assaulted” and detained without reason two French diplomats in Tehran.
Barrot said the two were questioned for hours and, in one case, “assaulted,” calling the incident “an extremely serious and unacceptable attack on the integrity of our agents [which] cannot go unpunished.”
After the pair returned to France, Iran declared them persona non grata and ineligible to re-enter the country.
On Tuesday, Barrot denounced that decision and followed through with his threat of retaliation while claiming the diplomats were attacked because of France’s support for the Iranian people in their struggle against repression.
“The Iranian people, a great people, are the primary victims of this period of extreme tension in the Middle East, caught in a vise between the bloody repression of the January 2026 protests and the [U.S.-Israeli] bombings,” he wrote.
“It is precisely because France stands alongside the Iranian people, supporting its artists, scientists, and researchers, that two French diplomats were scandalously and deliberately assaulted last July 19.”
The Iranian Foreign Ministry, meanwhile, said the two were banned because they had taken part in a “secret meeting” with suspects of a major case involving “foreign infiltration and interference.”
The ministry told the semi-official IRNA News Agency the diplomats’ activities were “in violation of international law, especially the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations of 1961.”
Iran contended the move was made because the French government “has not taken any action to rectify their behavior and guarantee the non-recurrence of such conduct weeks after the disclosure of their illegal behaviors.”