08-03-2025
Sweden asks Iran to immediately free ailing academic on death row
Summoning the Iranian ambassador, Sweden called for Jalali's "immediate release on humanitarian grounds so that he can be reunited with his family" and called for his "immediate access to the medical care he so clearly needs," the foreign ministry said in a statement.
The ministry also said it had reiterated a request to visit Jalali in jail.
In mid-January, Jalali accused the Swedish government of not taking sufficient action to obtain his release.
"It seems to not be a priority for the Swedish officials, what may happen to me as a Swedish citizen while I risk dying either by execution or due to poor health," he said in a message forwarded to AFP by his wife, Vida Mehrannia.
His remarks came as German-Iranian Nahid Taghavi was released from Tehran's Evin prison and returned home, just days after Iran released Italian journalist Cecilia Sala.
On June 15 last year, Tehran freed two Swedes, Johan Floderus, an EU diplomat who had been held since April 2022, and Saeed Azizi, who was arrested in November 2023, in exchange for Hamid Noury, a former Iranian prisons official serving a life sentence in Sweden.
But Jalali, whom Iran sentenced to death in 2017 on espionage charges and was granted Swedish nationality while in jail, was left out of the swap.
The government has insisted that it tried to obtain Jalali's release at the same time as Floderus and Azizi.
Western countries have for years accused Iran of detaining their nationals on trumped-up charges in a policy of state hostage-taking to use them as bargaining chips to extract concessions.
On Friday, the Swedish ministry reaffirmed its opposition to the death penalty and demanded that the sentence passed on the Swedish-Iranian would not be carried out.
