After leaving Iran, Shafiq first went to the United States. Then he joined his family in Paris, France, on 14 November 1979, and began organizing a resistance movement against the Islamic Republic. He founded the group, Iran Azad (Free Iran), which was later led by his sister Azadeh with whom he was living in Paris. They both acted as the Pahlavi family’s principal spokesmen. In Iran, Islamic judge Ayatollah Sadeq Khalkhali tried and sentenced him and other members of the Pahlavi family in absentia to death in a secret trial in the spring of 1979.