Tehran (IP) - In a letter to the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, the Secretary of Iran’s High Council for Human Rights on Tuesday criticized the illegal detention and trial of the Iranian diplomat Assadollah Asadi and demanded that the German and Belgian governments be held accountable.

Iran PressIran news: Kazem Gharibabadi, Secretary of Iran's High Council for Human Rights, in a letter to the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Michel Bachelet, expressed grave concern over gross human rights violations exercised against Assadollah Asadi in Germany and Belgium. 

Assadollah Asadi was arrested in July 2018 in the German state of Bavaria while returning to his residence in Vienna, despite having political immunity. One hundred days after his arrest, Asadi was transferred to Belgium in October 2018 with an illegal sentence by the German court in Karlsruhe. Following his transfer, the Belgian Antwerp Criminal Court illegally sentenced Asadi to 20 years in prison, contrary to his diplomatic immunity under the 1961 Vienna Convention.

According to the letter, Kazem Gharibabadi stressed that the prison authorities in Asadi's detention center in Belgium have denied him the opportunity to communicate with his children, brothers, sisters, and other relatives and are behaving in a very harsh and harassing manner which is a clear violation of Belgium's obligations under the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights. Gharibabadi added that Germany is a party to the 1961 Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations, and Assadollah Asadi is one of the diplomatic agents of the Islamic Republic of Iran in Vienna, Austria, and enjoys all immunities.

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