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Iranian flag over Tehran (archive image)
Photo: Vahid Salemi / AP
Iran's spiritual leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei regularly grants pardons or mitigates prison terms on important religious or national holidays.
Members of the Christian minority in the country rarely benefit from it.
That seems to be different this year.
Christian prison inmates in Iran were granted ten days' leave at the end of the year.
The Iranian justice chief Gholamhossein Mohseni-Edschei said on Sunday that the prisoners should be given the opportunity to celebrate New Year's Eve "and the birth of Jesus Christ" with their families.
Christians make up only about one percent of the population in the Muslim-majority Iran.
Most of them are from Armenia and celebrate Christmas on January 6th.
Christians who are serving a prison sentence for minor offenses benefit from the measure.
How many prisoners are allowed to leave the prison temporarily and when exactly they will be released remained unclear.
Politically, today, Monday, the next round of negotiations to restore the nuclear deal with Iran is on the agenda.
The aim is to find a solution in which the United States lifts its economic sanctions against Iran and in return Tehran restricts its nuclear program again.
Time for an agreement is running out
Diplomats from Germany, France, Great Britain, Russia and China mediate between the two warring states in Vienna.
The previous round ended in mid-December with no progress in terms of content.
The unresolved questions include the sequence and verifiability of the mutual steps.
The United States withdrew from the nuclear pact in 2018 under the then President Donald Trump and imposed sanctions again.
Iran responded by breaking various nuclear agreements designed to prevent the development of nuclear weapons.
From the point of view of Western diplomats, there are only a few weeks before the agreement becomes obsolete due to Iran's advances in nuclear technology.
Washington has proposed further sanctions if the Vienna negotiations are unsuccessful.
jok / AFP