It’s one thing to read about people being unlawfully detained in autocratic countries, reports about false charges, sham trials, and waning diplomatic efforts to free them, but it’s something very different to hear first-hand experience from those who lived through the hell of the utter helplessness of being in solitary confinement in one of the world’s toughest prisons for months or years. But these tales are not about despair but about clinging to every shred of hope amid the growing depths of uncertainty.
The same hope gave birth to the event in downtown Brussels on Thursday, organized by friends and family and meant to raise awareness about Johan Floderus and ramp up pressure on EU and Swedish diplomats to bring him home.
657 days
As of Saturday, February 3rd, Floderus, a Swedish EU diplomat and member of the European External Action Service, has been unlawfully imprisoned by the Iranian regime for 657 days. He was detained at the Tehran airport while visiting the country for a holiday in April 2022 on suspicion of espionage—and “intelligence cooperation with the Zionist regime”—and has been held in Evin Prison ever since.
Despite Sweden and Brussels repeatedly telling Tehran that Floderus was there for completely private reasons, the Islamic Republic maintains the espionage charges—which carry the death penalty in Iran—and has refused every request to release him.
Prior to the detention, Floderus visited Iran seven times, both privately and as part of EU diplomatic missions, but without any incidents. Before moving to Brussels, he even learned to speak fluent Farsi while studying in Tehran for a semester—a skill that is being used against him to justify the bogus spying charges.
The reason is simple: it’s part of Iran’s inhumane “hostage diplomacy” in which the country targets individuals with specific nationalities to use them as leverage and get something in return. According to the first public report about Floderus’ detention by The New York Times, Tehran could be trying to use him to force a prisoner swap with Stockholm. The subject of the swap is suspected to be Hamid Nouri, who’s serving a life sentence in Sweden for his part in mass executions in the 1980s.
In September last year, on his 33rd birthday, his family launched a public campaign, named #FreeJohanFloderus in support of his liberation. As part of the campaign, they released gruesome details about his detention, many of which violated the UN minimum rules for prisoner treatment.
For instance, Floderus was kept in solitary confinement in a fully lit cell for over 300 days and was granted only three hours of fresh air every week, while his correspondence was heavily restricted. He was allowed to call his family only once a month for a short and monitored discussion and was only allowed his first video call in August 2023, during which he made a “desperate plea” to raise efforts to release him.
That’s why about two hundred people came to hear about Johan from former prisoners of the Iranian regime and to understand how every one of us can, and must, play a role in getting him home.
Inside Unit 209
One of the speakers at the event was Olivier Vandecasteele, a humanitarian from Belgium who had been imprisoned in Tehran under the same circumstances in February 2022. Following a large public campaign, he was freed in May 2023 as part of a prisoner swap in which Belgium released Asadollah Asadi, a former diplomat convicted of plotting a terror attack against an Iranian opposition group in Paris.
Vadecasteele spent 455 days—or 15 months—in prison, and nearly all of it in very similar circumstances: solitary confinement in a tiny 3×4 meter room, lights on 24/7, a few hours of fresh air a week, and sometimes none.
He was held in Evin’s Prison’s infamous Unit 209, “a prison inside the prison,” which not even the Iranian judiciary has access to, only the intelligence and the Revolutionary Guard, who therefore have total impunity in how they treat inmates—psychological, and sometimes physical, torture included.
That’s also where he met Floderus during the three-week period where the two were allowed to briefly leave their solitary cells before being separated again. “Johan is still there” in Unit 209, Vandecasteele said, visibly emotional.
He recalled how they played games all day—first in their minds, then by making dice from bread—how they read to each other and talked endlessly about literature. In the end, the guards told them they were to be put back in solitary because they talked to each other too much.
“A few weeks is holdable, but as months pass it becomes very hard,” Vandecasteele told the audience. “You have zero control of your life and are completely dependent on the will of the guards for sunlight, phone calls, food, and everything.”
Being in a fully lit room with no window also meant the prisoners lost their sense of time, which was the first step toward breaking their minds and souls. Then come other “techniques,” such as taking away the few hard-won books they had “just for fun” or constantly demanding them to confess to the charges for which they know they could be killed the next day.
The worst is what the other guest, Bernard Phelan called “quiet torture,” a “typical Iranian technique,” which is a system of building up hope by telling prisoners they are to be released only to shatter them days or weeks later.
“Time is of the essence. The longer Johan stays there the more he will be affected by it. Not only today, but in his future,” he added.
Phelan, an Irish tourist guide spent “only” eight months in Iranian captivity, just because he happened to have his French passport with him instead of the Irish, and the Iranians were out shopping for a Frenchman that day. He got out relatively early because of the massive public mobilization by his family as well as the relentless diplomatic efforts of the Irish government—something that seems lacking in Stockholm in the case of Floderus.
“They [Swedish and EU diplomats] should suspend any dealing with Iran, and be more blunt and say there is a roadblock, called Johan,” Phelan said. “Iran is very transactional, the EU should be too, in certain cases.”
Both former prisoners agreed that the only thing that’s even more important is loud and relentless public support. Not only because it will eventually force the authorities to step up their game and bring back Floderus, but also because it “literally keeps him mentally alive.”
“The only thing they can’t take away is knowing that there are people doing things for you, this is what keeps you going,” Vandecasteele said.
But as both speakers’ cases demonstrate, the louder the public campaign, the quicker someone is freed. That’s where anyone can come in. The organizers stressed that every signature, hashtag, tweet, share, flier, or sticker counts, as well as every person who shows up to their events.
On April 17th, the anniversary of Floderus’ imprisonment, the campaign team will organize large public vigils in Stockholm and Brussels, in front of the Swedish embassy. It was similar vigils that eventually resulted in Phelan and Vandecasteele being released, and the campaign team hopes they will finally break the ice with this one in the case of Floderus too.
The petition and more information about how you can help is available online, at https://www.freejohanfloderus.org/
