Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi has ratified a prisoner exchange treaty with Belgium, after Parliament approved the measure in August in the face of criticism from Brussels over the detention of an NGO worker.
According to information gathered by the Iranian news agency IRNA, Raisi has given his approval to the document and has notified his decision to the Ministry of Justice, without any further details having emerged for the moment.
The Belgian government revealed in July that Olivier Vandecasteele, a humanitarian worker, was arrested in February and charged with espionage. «This person is suspected of espionage, but there is not the slightest indication that this is based on fact,» said Justice Minister Vincent van Quickenborne.
Given this situation, Brussels is working to secure the release, something that cannot take place unless there is a treaty between Belgium and Iran. The prisoner swap would involve the Iranian diplomat, Asadollah Asadi, sentenced to 20 years by an Antwerp court in 2021 for attempted murder and participating in terrorist activities.
Asadi, an Iranian diplomat at his country’s embassy in Vienna, was arrested in Germany and subsequently extradited to Belgium, where he was tried along with three other suspects arrested in Brussels for collaborating in the preparation of the attack and who have themselves been sentenced to between 15 and 18 years in prison.
The conviction of Asadi provoked harsh criticism from Tehran, which stressed that the «detention, judicial process and conviction of Asadi violates the 1961 Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations», and demanded the release of the Iranian diplomat.
Iran has denied the accusations against its diplomatic representative and denounced a plot to undermine relations with the countries of the European Union, as well as defending that those arrested in Brussels were in fact members of the opposition group People’s Mujahedin Organization of Iran (PMOI), considered a terrorist group by Tehran.
