Color me surprised (not really) but this afternoon a French court rejected the U.S. request to extradite Majid Kakavand, an Iranian alleged to have been involved in the export of U.S.-origin items to Iran through a company he created in Malaysia. This blog has posted on the Kakavand case here, here, and here. Today’s decision was foreshadowed by earlier findings by French government agencies that the U.S.-origin items were not dual use items, as the U.S. claimed, and that therefore their export to Iran didn’t violate French law, a precondition to granting an extradition request in this case.

A spokesman for the Department of Justice indicated that the Department wouldn’t give up and would continue to pursue Kakavand. Since Kakavand says he’s hopping on the first plane back to Tehran, one has to wonder what the DOJ has in mind here. Are they going to request that Iran extradite him? I suppose that they are hoping that Kakavand will visit, say, Georgia or some other country that might be more favorable to an extradition request or an extraordinary rendition. I’m not taking that bet.

A French-language press report in L’Express added some interesting details. Kakavand’s case had been diplomatically linked to the case of Clotilde Reiss, a French citizen being held in Tehran for having violated Iranian law when she took photographs of the Iranian election protests and emailed them to a friend. Nevertheless, Kakavand threw Ms. Reiss under his departing Airbus by saying he hoped she would be released “if she were innocent.” But, if she did take those pictures, well, too bad for her.

Mr. Kakavand, who is unlikely to be travelling anywhere outside of Iran other than France, indicated his desire to return to the land of Voltaire and Montesquieu, noting, as L’Express put it, that “il connaît déjà un peu la langue et qu’il a appris, malgré tout, à aimer.” (“He already knew a little bit of French, which he had, notwithstanding everything else, learned to love.”) He may, however, have a hard time finding copies of Proust and Stendahl to read in Tehran.

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