French-Iranian academic Fariba Adelkhah (pictured) has been temporarily released from an Iran prison on furlough.

Adelkhah’s lawyer Saeid Dehghan announced that she was freed on Saturday: “Fariba Adelkhah has come out on leave with an electronic ankle bracelet.”

He gave no further details, and the Iranian judiciary issued no statement.

Adelkhah, an anthropologist at Sciences Po University in Paris, was detained in June 2019 as she carried out academic research. She was sentenced in May to a total of 6 1/2 years in prison.

In June, an appeals court upheld the punishment. French officials demanded that she be released immediately, but Tehran bluntly rejected Paris’s approach.

Some dual and foreign nationals, including Adelkhah’s partner and academic colleague Roland Marchal, were freed in prisoner exchanges. Others such as Anglo-Iranian charity worker Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe were granted furlough amid the spread of Coronavrirus in prisons.

However, there was no sign of any easing of Adelkhah’s punishment or prison conditions, especially after she and Australian academic Kylie Moore-Gilbert — still detainee — went on hunger strike in December 2019 to call for freedom for political prisoners.

See also From Academic to Political Prisoner in Iran — Kylie Moore-Gilbert’s Story