French lecturer Clotilde Reiss, left, who was reportedly arrested at Tehran airport on July 1 and jailed on charges of spying linked to riots over last month’s presidential election, stands Saturday in the courtroom in Tehran, Iran, in this photo released by the semi-official Iranian Fars News Agency. Dozens of opposition activists and protesters stood trial in Tehran Saturday on charges of rioting and plotting to topple the ruling Islamic system following the disputed presidential election, Iran’s state media reported.

Tehran, Iran ? A young French academic and local staff of the British and French embassies stood trial Saturday with dozens of Iranian opposition figures and confessed to being involved in the country’s postelection unrest.

Iran’s opposition and rights groups have condemned the trial as a sham and say such confessions are coerced and scripted. Britain, which seemed caught off guard by the appearance of its embassy employee, called it an outrage, while France demanded the immediate release of its citizen.

Saturday’s second hearing at Tehran’s Revolutionary Court involved a new group of detainees and focused on testimony from the French academic and the two other foreign-linked defendants, demonstrating the government’s resolve to taint Iran’s pro-reform movement as a tool of foreign countries — particularly Britain and the United States.

The prosecutor accused the two countries of fomenting the unrest in an attempt to engineer a “soft overthrow” of the government.

The French academic and the two embassy employees took turns standing at a podium in the large, wood-paneled courtroom to make confessions before a judge seated between two large portraits for Iran’s supreme leader and the Islamic Republic’s founder.

The French Embassy employee, Nazak Afshar, cried as she admitted she was involved in postelection disturbances. She dabbed her eyes with a tissue and said that “brothers at the Intelligence Ministry made me understand my mistake,” the official Islamic Republic News Agency reported.

Such confessions — whether coerced or not — have become the centerpiece of Iran’s mass trial of more than 100 prominent opposition figures and activists, which began a week ago.

The defendants are accused of crimes including rioting, spying and plotting to overthrow the regime during the massive street demonstrations denouncing the official results of the June 12 election.

The prosecutor read out an indictment at Saturday’s session that accuses Britain and the U.S. of planning to rouse the unrest with the aim of toppling Iran’s Islamic rulers through a “soft overthrow,” the IRNA news agency reported. The indictment also accused the two powers of providing financial assistance to Iran’s reformists to undermine hard-line ruling clerics.