France slams Iranian travel ban on poetess

AFP, Paris, March 8, 2010  – France on Monday criticised Iran’s decision to bar its most celebrated living poetess Simin Behbahani from leaving the country for International Women’s Day ceremonies.
Officials confiscated Behbahani’s passport at Tehran’s Imam Khomeini airport Monday morning as she was set to leave and told her to follow up the matter through the revolutionary court, Opposition website Keleme.com said.
’Our country was looking forward to seeing Simin Behbahani, whose commitment to the cause of women and freedom is met with admiration and who was notably awarded the Simone de Beauvoir prize for women’s freedom in 2009,’ French foreign ministry spokesman Bernard Valero said in a statement.
It hailed the ’courage’ of a ’major figure of Persian contemporary poetry’ whose attitude ’mirrors that of many Iranians who in spite of repression fight peacefully for their fundamental rights’.
’France welcomes their courage and determination,’ the statement said.
Paris Mayor Bertrand Delanoe said the travel ban was ’another affront to this great creator’ and an ’unacceptable new violation of human rights in general and women’s dignity in particular’.
’The activities of this arbitrary and negationist police state can only reinforce democrats’ determination to fight it,’ added Delanoe, a socialist.
Delanoe will on Friday meet with Iran’s Nobel peace prize winner and human rights campaigner Shirin Ebadi who warned Wednesday against imposing international sanctions on her country, but pleaded with Western companies not to assist the government.
Behbahani, 82, is also a feminist advocating better rights for Iranian women who face several inequalities under the Sharia-based law in place in the Islamic republic since its 1979 revolution.
’Paris municipality had invited me for March 8 and I had prepared a text about feminism and a poem about women which I was going to read at the ceremony and return on Wednesday,’ Behbahani was quoted as saying in Tehran.
Behbahani is close to Ebadi — both condemning the Islamic republic’s treatment of women as discriminatory.
She was reportedly beaten up by security forces in a 2006 rally in a central Tehran park on Women’s Day.