Italy has urged Iran to “immediately” release an Italian journalist being held in solitary confinement in Tehran’s infamous Evin prison.
Cecilia Sala, a 29 year-old correspondent for Il Foglio and the podcast company Chora Media, has described her punishing jail conditions in a phone call to her parents in Italy, saying that she is forced to sleep on the floor of her cell and telling them to ask the authorities in Rome to try to free her quickly.
Amid continued internal dissent, Ms Sala’s detention is yet another example of Iran’s systematic efforts to suppress press freedom. The country is ranked 176th out of 180 nations on the 2024 World Press Freedom Index by Reporters Without Borders.
Ms Sala was arrested in Tehran on 19th December despite holding a valid press visa. She’d arrived in Iran the week before to report on the latest developments in the country, having covered anti-government protests earlier in the year. Her podcast has featured interviews with various dissenting voices – and the day before her arrest she released an episode in which she talked to Zeynab Mousavi, a stand-up comedian imprisoned for criticising the regime’s mandatory hijab laws.
Iran has since confirmed that Ms Sala was arrested for “violating the law of the Islamic Republic of Iran”, but has provided no further details.
During a 30-minute visit to Ms Sala on 27th December, Paola Amadei, Italy’s ambassador to Iran, was asked to speak English so guards could understand the conversation. The ambassador also gave the authorities a package for Ms Sala, which was reported to contain clothes, cigarettes, panettone, four books from the embassy library and an eye mask to counter the bright lights kept on 24 hours a day in her cell. But during the call to her parents on New Year’s Day, Ms Sala said she had not received it.
One Iranian student formerly imprisoned in Evin told the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera that it could get bitterly cold in the windowless isolation cells. According to a recent report by Human Rights Watch, detainees there face prolonged solitary confinement, denial of medical care and being coerced into confessions.
At a meeting last week with Iran’s ambassador to Rome, the Italian foreign minister Antonio Tajani insisted that Ms Sala should be provided with “the comfort items that she has been denied so far”. He also asked for “total guarantees” about her prison conditions and demanded her “immediate release”.
Ms Sala’s detention has been widely seen as a tit-for-tat following the arrest in Milan three days earlier of Mohammad Abedini, a Swiss-Iranian man accused by the US of supplying components for Iranian killer drones. Abedini risks a life sentence in America for his alleged dealings with Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), which is considered a terrorist organisation by the US. While Italian judges consider the extradition request – a process that could take months – he is being held at Milan’s Opera prison, where he has a bed and a TV in his cell.
Kylie Moore-Gilbert, an Australian-British academic and Middle East expert, said Ms Sala was likely to have been arrested to use in a prisoner swap to get Abedini back before he was handed over to the US.
“Cecilia is the latest victim of the Islamic Republic’s increasingly brazen hostage diplomacy,” she posted on X, formerly Twitter. “The IRGC went looking for Italians, and they found her. It’s beyond time that the EU and all western democracies start to take this growing geopolitical threat seriously.”
Ms Moore-Gilbert was herself arrested in Iran in 2018 on spying charges and spent two years in jail before being freed as part of an exchange for three Iranian terrorists convicted for their role in a 2012 Bangkok bomb plot.
Full story here.
