The Dutch professional association of physicists NNV regularly held readings in a small room that was part of the nuclear power plant in the town of Petten. Until July 2008 that was, when the Dutch government instituted an official boycott of Iran. The boycott was supposed to prevent Dutch nuclear secrets from falling into Iranian hands, perhaps through Iranian students visiting the Netherlands.

The boycott meant Iranian national Nasser Kalantar, the chair of the NNV’s nuclear physics section, was no longer welcome at the nuclear plant. “Not even in the cafeteria,” said Kalantar, who is also a professor of experimental physics at Groningen University.

On Wednesday however, the The Hague district court ruled the policy unfairly discriminated against people of Iranian descent, effectively putting an end to Kalantar’s expulsion from Petten.

The spectre of nuclear espionage still lingers in the Netherlands, where Abdul Quadeer Khan learned all he needed about enrichment technology in the 1970s to help his home country, Pakistan, to build a nuclear bomb after he returned there. Khan later admitted to also playing a key role in the proliferation of nuclear technology to Iran, Libya and North Korea, a confession he later recanted however.