{"id":1521,"date":"2020-02-29T04:58:21","date_gmt":"2020-02-29T04:58:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/codir.net\/?p=1521"},"modified":"2020-02-29T04:58:21","modified_gmt":"2020-02-29T04:58:21","slug":"torture-and-sexual-threats-detailed-in-letters-by-jailed-former-un-environment-consultant","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/codir.net\/?p=1521","title":{"rendered":"\u201cTorture\u201d and \u201cSexual Threats\u201d Detailed in Letters by Jailed Former UN Environment Consultant"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Conservation Scientist Niloufar Bayani: \u201cEvery time I\u2026 sought help from the authorities, the pressures, threats, and acts of torture increased.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Appeals Court Upheld Prison Sentences Against Conservationists on Baseless Charges and Coerced \u201cConfessions\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n

February 20, 2020 \u2013 A female former\u00a0UN Environment consultant\u2019s\u00a0complaints of physical and psychological torture at the hands of her male interrogators were ignored by Iranian judicial officials, and forced \u201cconfessions\u201d obtained as a result of torture were used to imprison her and\u00a0seven fellow wildlife conservationists, according to her\u00a0newly published\u00a0letters from Tehran\u2019s Evin Prison.<\/p>\n

In one of conservation scientist Niloufar Bayani\u2019s letters to then-Judiciary Chief Sadegh Larijani, dated January 24, 2019, and\u00a0excerpted online\u00a0by BBC Persian on February 18, 2020, Bayani described being forced to endure \u201cinterrogations lasting 9-12 hours day and night\u201d while held for eight months in \u201csolitary confinement\u201d:<\/p>\n

\u201cI was interrogated blindfolded while standing, spinning or sit-and-standing\u2026 threatened with the arrest and torture of my 70-year-old mother and father\u2026 threatened with physical torture by being shown images and descriptions of torture devices\u2026heard hours of detailed descriptions about the suffering and pain caused by torture.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cFor the past two years we\u2019ve been\u00a0documenting\u00a0egregious rights abuses in the cases of Bayani and her imprisoned colleagues while sadistic intelligence agents and judicial officials have been manufacturing a case against them,\u201d said the communications director of the Center for Human Rights in Iran (CHRI) Jasmin Ramsey.<\/p>\n

\u201cInstead of halting the horrendous mistreatment of these peaceful wildlife conservationists, Iran\u2019s then-Judiciary Chief Sadegh Larijani looked on while they were sentenced to prison without due process,\u201d Ramsey added. \u201cNewly appointed Judiciary Chief Ebrahim Raisi should release them immediately and allow an independent investigation into Bayani\u2019s complaints.\u201d<\/p>\n

Bayani also described being repeatedly sexually harassed.<\/p>\n

\u201cI was increasingly terrified that if I didn\u2019t write whatever [my interrogator] wanted, he would violently sexually assault me,\u201d wrote Bayani, 32, in one of the excerpted letters that was translated into English by CHRI.<\/p>\n

\u201cBecause of his inexplicable sudden appearances and disgusting behavior in various places like dark passages and in the detention yard, I didn\u2019t feel safe anywhere. Intolerable anxiety never ceased,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

\u201cEvery time I\u2026 sought help from the authorities, the pressures, threats and acts of torture increased,\u201d added Bayani, who worked as a consultant for the\u00a0UN Environment Program\u00a0between 2012-17.<\/p>\n

In her letter to the judiciary chief, Bayani\u2014who is currently serving a\u00a010-year prison sentence\u2014had requested that the court release audio and video recordings of her interrogations as well as her medical files to prove her allegations.<\/p>\n

On February 19, the lawyer of Bayani\u2019s colleague\u00a0Sepideh Kashani\u00a0told the Persian-language Ensaf News that Kashani had presented the court with an \u201caffidavit\u201d and \u201cwritten statements\u201d detailing \u201csimilar\u201d experiences that \u201ctotally undermined the foundations of the investigations against her.\u201d<\/p>\n

Bayani, an Iranian citizen, received her master\u2019s degree in conservation biology from Columbia University in 2012 before working for the UNEP in Geneva. In 2017, she returned to Iran to work for the Persian Wildlife Heritage Foundation (PWHF), a non-profit organization that was operating in Tehran with the permission of the Iranian government.<\/p>\n

The Iranian judiciary\u2019s imprisonment of Bayani and eight of her PHWF colleagues (former PWHF Managing Director Kavous Seyed-Emami\u00a0died\u00a0in January 2018 while held for interrogations in Evin Prison) has been\u00a0internationally condemned\u00a0by environmental and human rights-focused organizations including the UN and renowned primatologist\u00a0Jane Goodall\u00a0among 370 distinguished conservationists and academics.<\/p>\n

On February 19, UNEP Executive Director Inger Andersen\u00a0tweeted\u00a0that she was \u201cdisheartened and disappointed\u201d by the appeals court\u2019s verdict and called for \u201cclemency.\u201d<\/p>\n

The eight conservationists have been held in Tehran\u2019s Evin Prison since January 2018 when they were\u00a0first arrested\u00a0by agents of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps\u2019 intelligence organization. The IRGC continued building a case against them on fabricated \u201cespionage\u201d charges after three\u00a0major state agencies\u00a0including the Intelligence Ministry and Supreme National Security Council said the charges were baseless.<\/p>\n

A source with detailed knowledge of the conservationists\u2019 cases told CHRI that the defendants and their lawyers have yet to be officially notified of the Appeals Court\u2019s\u00a0verdict\u00a0which was announced by Judiciary Spokesman Gholam-Hossein Esmaili at a\u00a0press\u00a0conference\u00a0in Tehran on February 18, 2020.<\/p>\n

Excerpts from BBC Persian Article on Bayani\u2019s Letters<\/strong><\/p>\n

The following paragraphs from the\u00a0BBC Persian\u00a0article that excerpted Bayani\u2019s letters were translated into English<\/p>\n

In her description written in early February 2020, the conservationist said that the agents forced her to \u201cmimic sounds of wild animals\u201d and threatened to inject her with \u201ccrippling ampoules and air ampoules.\u201d Bayani said interrogators showed her a photo of [PWHF colleague and Iranian Canadian citizen]\u00a0Kavous Seyed Emami\u2019s\u00a0corpse and warned: \u201cThat\u2019s going to be your fate and the fate of all of your colleagues and family members unless you write whatever we want.\u201d<\/p>\n

[Note by CHRI: Former PWHF Managing Director Kavous Seyed-Emami\u00a0died while held for interrogations\u00a0in Tehran\u2019s Evin Prison less than two weeks after he was arrested by IRGC agents.]<\/p>\n

Bayani also wrote a letter to Ayatollah Khamenei on February 11, 2019, describing how she was treated by IRGC interrogators. She said seven armed men took her to a\u00a0villa in Lavasan, north Tehran, and forced her to \u201cwatch them engage in immoral and un-Islamic behavior in a private swimming pool.\u201d<\/p>\n

In another letter to the head of IRGC\u2019s Ward 2-A in Evin Prison, on January 16, 2019, Bayani wrote that \u201cduring long interrogations\u201d agents \u201crepeatedly made the most filthy sexual insults\u2026 in detailed, disgusting, imaginary situations and wanted to [force me] me to complete their sexual fantasies.\u201d Stressing it was pointless to complain to the authorities, she added: \u201cShockingly, every time I exposed this behavior and sought help from the authorities, the pressures, threats and acts of torture increased and they repeatedly told me\u2026 not to do anything to irritate the regime.\u201d<\/p>\n

Also, in her never-published final defense presented to the court in August 2019, Bayani described her constant fear that agents may carry out their sexual threats: \u201cVideo recordings are a witness to how I was treated by the main interrogator\u2026 \u2018Hamid Rezaie,\u2019 whose name still makes me shudder. He was so shameful that whenever interrogations dragged on into the darkness [of the night], I would shake all over in fear of being seriously assaulted.\u201d She continued: \u201cI was increasingly terrified that if I didn\u2019t write whatever he wanted, he would violently sexually assault me. Because of his inexplicable sudden appearances and disgusting behavior in various places like dark passages and in the detention yard, I didn\u2019t feel safe anywhere. Intolerable anxiety never ceased.\u201d<\/p>\n

In another letter on January 24, 2019, to Sadegh Larijani, Iran\u2019s Judiciary Chief at the time, Bayani wrote that IRGC intelligence agents had bluntly told her that \u201cthey would punch the judge\u2019s mouth if he read a verdict in court other than what the IRGC had determined in advance.\u201d In her letter written earlier this month, Bayani described tortures suffered during \u201c22 months of illegal temporary detention\u201d in the IRGC\u2019s Ward 2-A. \u201cAll the confessions about espionage or engaging in other criminal acts were dictated and induced under the most severe mental and psychological torture as well as physical and sexual threats during at least 1,200 hours of interrogation,\u201d she wrote. To prove her assertions, she requested the judiciary release audio and video recording of the interrogations along with medical files concerning her condition in detention. The conservationist added that \u201cnot even a single reason or legal document was presented\u201d by the prosecution to back up the charges made against her and she was convicted only on the basis of forced confessions and military reports \u201cthat, according to the judge presiding over Branch 15 of the Revolutionary Court in Tehran, were so secret that neither the accused, nor the lawyer or even the judge himself, had permission to view.\u201d<\/p>\n

Bayani added that she was \u201cthreatened with execution on a daily basis\u201d and \u201cendured eight months of total isolation in solitary confinement with long interrogations lasting 9-12 hours day and night.\u201d She was \u201cinterrogated blindfolded while standing, spinning or sit-and-standing,\u201d \u201cthreatened with the arrest and torture of my 70-year-old mother and father,\u201d \u201cthreatened to be imprisoned in a one-meter cell,\u201d \u201cthreatened with physical torture by being shown images and descriptions of torture devices,\u201d \u201cheard hours of detailed descriptions about the suffering and pain caused by torture as well as feelings at the moment execution.\u201d<\/p>\n

In her letter in early February 2020, the conservationist also wrote that interrogators \u201clifted her sleeve and threatened to inject crippling ampoules and air ampoules.\u201d During weeks of interrogation one of the agents \u201ckicked my chair so many times\u2026 that I suffered severe back pains,\u201d Bayani said and another interrogator pretending to be a cleric \u201casked me to decide if I wanted to be flogged seventy times in the course of two days or 50 times in one day.\u201d In her January 16, 2019, letter to the head of Ward 2-A, Bayani had mentioned that the so-called cleric had claimed to have been granted authority by IRGC intelligence organization chief Hossein Taleb to \u201cconduct torture by ordering me to be flogged.\u201d<\/p>\n

In her February 11, 2019, letter to Khamenei, Bayani complained about the \u201cturbaned person\u201d and wrote that he had once told her that he would be conducting part of her trial in the IRGC\u2019s Ward 2-A \u201cand when I expressed surprise, he got angry and threw a chair at me and injured my knee.\u201d \u201cWhat completed my mental breakdown was when I was suddenly shown a photo of Dr. Seyed-Emami\u2019s corpse in the cold room as his family stood by. [Agents] told me \u2018That\u2019s going to be your fate and the fate of all of your colleagues and family members unless you write whatever we want.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

She added: \u201cWhile I completely lost the strength to resist their pressures, agents dictated things that were later leveraged against me. They said \u2018you wrote your death sentence with your own hand. You can\u2019t get off this train anymore.\u2019\u201d According to Bayani, the interrogators said \u2018the only way to save yourself and your colleagues is to write down everything we want,\u2019 in other words an unbelievable fictional scenario about espionage under the guise of protecting the environment.\u201d<\/p>\n

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