France seeks release of woman in Tihar jail

NEW DELHI: The French government has urged India to release on bail one of its citizens, Marie Emmanuelle Verhoeven, languishing in Tihar Jail. The French embassy has asked the Ministry of External Affairs to consider its request for the release of the 55-yearold on “humanitarian grounds.”

The French invoked the Vienna Convention for the bail as temporary relief to Verhoeven. The letter was sent a day before a court in Delhi was to hear her bail petition. Verhoeven has been lodged in Tihar since February 2015, after she was arrested when she entered the country as there was a red-corner notice against her. The woman is accused of being a conspirator in the assassination of Chilean senator Jaime Guzman.

“While giving due respect to the decision of the SC of India upholding the validity of the extradition treaty between India and Chile, the embassy would also like to draw the ministry’s attention to the condition of the detainee, who has already spent more than a year-and-a-quarter in Tihar Jail,” the French plea said. “Ms Verhoeven is under great psychological and physical stress and has suffered from severe detention conditions, as already expressed in the embassy’s earlier note (February 2)”. The concluding paragraph reads “therefore, under the framework of consular protection as defined by the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations, 1963, the embassy would request the esteemed ministry to consider providing Ms Verhoeven temporary relief on humanitarian grounds by granting her bail”. The court has given a week’s time to MEA to clarify its stand on the bail application.