France has decided to expel two Iranian diplomats in response to Tehran’s ban on the return to Iran of two employees of the French embassy. This was announced on Tuesday by French Foreign Minister Jean-Noël Barrot.

“Two Iranian diplomats in France will be expelled in the coming days,” Barrot wrote on the social network X.

According to him, this decision was a response to the “unacceptable” treatment of French diplomats, who were detained and questioned for several hours in July by Iranian security forces.

The French minister said that one of the diplomats, including the cultural attaché, was subjected to physical violence. According to him, the detention was an “extremely serious act of intimidation” and a violation of diplomatic immunity.

On July 20, Barrot said that French diplomats had been stopped and questioned by the Iranian authorities the previous day. Paris claims that the embassy staff became targets of pressure because of their contacts with representatives of Iranian civil society.

Iranian authorities rejected the accusations of mistreatment. Tehran said the diplomats had only been briefly questioned because they were “interfering in Iran’s internal affairs under the pretext of engagement with civil society.”