We first see her from the back, wearing a leather jacket. She is running through a field of rapeseed flowers, her black curly hair shining in the sun. A few seconds later, she turns around and turns to the camera. Her young face is lit by a smile. It was in 2014, in Switzerland, when Iranian Niloufar Bayani was still working in Geneva for the United Nations environment program. Four years later, in January 2018, this biodiversity conservation specialist was arrested in Iran, along with seven other colleagues. Among them, she is the one who suffered the most pressure: eight months in solitary confinement before being sentenced, in February 2020, after 1,200 hours of interrogation, to ten years in prison for ” spying “ under cover of his actions in favor of the environment, the heaviest sentence among the accused.
The Covid-19 health crisis had led her family to imagine that the young woman could benefit from a temporary release from Evin prison, in Tehran. This hope has fizzled out. This is why, after two and a half years of silence, those close to Niloufar Bayani decided to testify. The 33-year-old Iranian is the only one, among her colleagues, to have dared, during her trial and in letters addressed to the Iranian authorities, to denounce the torture she suffered. She thus became a new figure of resistance in Iran.
“Worst insults”
Recently released, these letters are unpublished documents on the treatment of political prisoners in Iran and shed a harsh light on the grip on justice of the Revolutionary Guards, the ideological army behind the arrest of the defenders environment and so many other Iranians.
“After the first months of prison, which were very hard, it is as if, suddenly, Niloufar had become strong, unbreakable, unbreakable, that she was no longer afraid., tells from Tehran Mazdak, one of his close friends, who prefers to be quoted under a pseudonym. From there she recounted what she had experienced. “
In one of his letters, Niloufar Bayani testifies to the influence of the Revolutionary Guards on justice. “My interrogators kept telling me: ‘We knock on the mouth of the judge who would not accept the sentence that the Revolutionary Guards will dictate to him.’ “ She also recounts having been the subject “The worst insults of a sexual nature during very long interrogations in the presence of a team of agents who asked me to satisfy their sexual fantasies”.
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