The Iranian authorities have announced that they will prevent the entry into the country of two workers from the French Embassy, involved in a diplomatic incident last month, when they were held for several hours accused of interfering in Iranian internal affairs due to their support for civil society organizations.
The spokesman for the Iranian Foreign Ministry, Esmaeil Baqaei, detailed in a press conference that the dispute with France will be settled with the definitive departure of these two employees, who will be blocked from returning to Tehran.
"After summoning the French ambassador, these two embassy employees will leave the country and will not have the right to return to Iran," he stated in remarks reported by the IRIB agency.
The two workers were detained for questioning at the end of July by Iranian security agents, in an action that the French Government described as "intimidation" and considered "extremely serious." The French Foreign Ministry spoke of a "premeditated and deliberate aggression" by Iran and summoned the Iranian chargé d'affaires to convey a formal protest regarding the incident, while Tehran responded by also summoning the French diplomatic representative in the country.
The Islamic Republic maintained that the two French officials "have a history" and argued that, under the cover of their diplomatic status, they would be intervening in Iranian internal politics with "actions that are not justified at all under the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations of 1961."