Jailed scholar can appeal, Iran says

Xiyue Wang, a graduate student at Princeton, was detained in Iran in August after spending the summer researching the Qajar dynasty, the university said.

ISTANBUL — An American scholar jailed in Iran can appeal a verdict sentencing him to 10 years in prison for espionage, Iranian judicial authorities said, after an apparently secret trial in which he was accused of using his status as a student to send documents to the U.S. government.

Xiyue Wang, a graduate student at Princeton, was detained in Iran in August after spending the summer researching the Qajar dynasty, the university said. The arrest of the 37-year-old, an expert on Eurasian history, had not been made public until this past weekend, when his sentence was announced.

“He is innocent of all the charges. In Tehran, Wang collected documents that were 100 years old,” said Stephen Kotkin, Wang’s adviser at Princeton.

“He has told me often of his exhilaration at the exquisiteness and depth of Persian civilization,” Kotkin said.

He was expecting to continue his research in Russia and needed to get as much work done in Iran as he could before taking up a fellowship there, Kotkin said.

That included scanning large volumes of documents that he could access later — something Kotkin described as “normal, standard scholarly practice.”

“We saw nothing out of the ordinary on anything that he undertook or did,” Kotkin said. “He’s a graduate student in good standing.”

Princeton’s vice president of communications, Daniel Day, said the university was “very distressed by the charges brought against him.”

“His family and the university are distressed at his continued imprisonment and are hopeful that he will be released after his case is heard by the appellate authorities in Tehran,” Day said.

Gholam Hossein Mohseni Ejehi, a spokesman for Iran’s judiciary, announced Sunday that a U.S. citizen had been sentenced for “infiltration” but did not give details. Rights groups say Iran’s judiciary is a hard-line and secretive institution and that convictions are often based on little to no evidence and vague charges.

“It was verified and determined that he was gathering [information] and was involved in infiltration,” Mohseni Ejehi said at a news conference in Tehran.

The Mizan news agency, which is affiliated with Iran’s judiciary, later reported that Wang was sentenced as part of an “infiltration project” that included the gathering of “confidential articles” to send to the State Department and other Western academic institutions.

The report said Wang had infiltrated Iran’s national archives and other libraries to create a digital archive for certain “centers of subversion” in Britain and the United States, including the State Department. It said he had managed to digitize 4,500 articles, and it cited a quote from Wang as evidence of his guilt.

“I have been having trouble accessing Tehran’s archives and libraries,” Wang had said in the 2015-16 annual report of the British Institute of Persian Studies, a nonprofit organization based in London. Mizan published the quote with the line: “Wang admits his mission.”

“Mrs. Reyhanpour offered to help,” Wang continued in the report, referring to one of the institute’s employees. “And within a few days, she put me in contact with senior scholars at the National Archive. … Without Mrs. Reyhanpour’s help it would be hard to imagine how long it would have taken for me to become acquainted with academic institutions in Iran.”

Wang’s conviction comes at a particularly tense time for U.S.-Iranian relations, which have deteriorated since President Donald Trump took office.

Under the previous administration, the United States and other world powers negotiated a deal with Iran to curb its nuclear program in exchange for sanctions relief. It was hailed as a victory for diplomacy and an end to Iran’s global isolation.

Since then, the Trump administration has stepped up its anti-Iran rhetoric and placed U.S. participation in the nuclear deal under review. Monday was the deadline for the White House to issue a waiver on nuclear-related sanctions against Iran, a provision that is required periodically under the terms of the 2015 nuclear deal.

Late Monday, the administration told Congress for a second time that Iran is complying with the nuclear deal and can continue to enjoy sanctions relief, even as it insisted Tehran would face consequences for breaching “the spirit” of the deal.

Trump, who lambasted the 2015 pact as a candidate, gave himself more time to decide whether to scuttle it or let it stand. Instead, senior Trump administration officials sought to emphasize their concerns about Iran’s non-nuclear behavior and vowed that those transgressions won’t go unpunished.

In a shift from Trump’s previous threat to “rip up” the deal, officials said the administration was working with U.S. allies to try to fix the deal’s flaws, including the expiration of some nuclear restrictions after a decade or more. The officials also said the U.S. would slap Tehran with new sanctions, penalizing it for developing ballistic missiles and other activity.

Trump, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and “the entire administration judge that Iran is unquestionably in default of the spirit” of the agreement, one official said. That assessment carries no legal force, while Trump’s certification that Iran is technically complying clears the way for sanctions to remain lifted.

Under the deal struck by former President Barack Obama and other world leaders, Iran agreed to roll back its nuclear program, long suspected of being aimed at developing atomic weapons, in return for billions of dollars in sanctions relief.