September 15, 2023
In a throwback to the 1979 hostage crisis, a European Union diplomat has been imprisoned in Iran for more than 500 days; a Swedish national, he is presumably being held as a bargaining chip for an Iranian jailed by Sweden for his role in the 1988 mass executions by Iran.
The arrest has been kept under wraps for over a year by the Swedish and European Union authorities. It was reported September 4 by The New York Times. Sweden and the EU then confirmed the detention.
The man, Johan Floderus, 33, a native of Sweden, has held several positions in the European Union’s institutions, coming up through its civil service training program. He was even featured in an advertising campaign to attract young Swedes to European Union careers.
Floderus visited Iran as a tourist with several Swedish friends. As he prepared to leave Tehran April 17, 2022, he was detained at the Imam Khomeini airport.
Three months later, in July last year, the Iranian government released a statement announcing that it had apprehended a Swedish national for espionage. It did not name the person, nor say he was a diplomat. The Judiciary said September 14 that he was arrested for “committing crimes,” but did not mention espionage.
The New York Times said it spoke to six people with firsthand knowledge of the case. All denied Floderus had been involved in espionage.
The Swedish Ministry for Foreign Affairs said it would not comment on the details of the case, citing a need for secrecy. “A Swedish citizen a man in his 30s was detained in Iran in April 2022,” its press department told The New York Times. “The Ministry for Foreign Affairs and the Embassy of Sweden in Tehran are working on the case intensively.”
“We understand that there is interest in this matter, but in our assessment it would complicate the handling of the case if the ministry were to publicly discuss its actions,” it added.
In 2021, Floderus joined the European External Action Service, the bloc’s diplomatic corps. He is the first diplomat that Iran has imprisoned since the 52 US diplomats held 444 days in 1979-81. He had visited Iran previously, without incident, on official European Union business, when he worked for the bloc’s development program, people familiar with his background told The New York Times.
The Iranian statement announcing the arrest of a Swedish national in 2022 made note that the person had visited the country before, citing that visit as evidence of nefarious activity.
Floderus’s family said in a statement, “We, Johan’s family, are deeply worried and in despair. Johan was suddenly and without reason deprived of his liberty on a vacation trip and has been in an Iranian prison for more than 500 days.”
Relations between Iran and Sweden are at a nadir. In July last year, a Swedish court sentenced a former senior Iranian judicial official, Hamid Nouri, to life in prison over crimes committed in 1988 in Iran. Floderus was arrested while Nouri was on trial.
The landmark case against Nouri, who was found to have played a role in the execution of thousands of Iranians, mostly but not exclusively members of the Mojahedin-e Khalq, was a rare example of “universal jurisdiction,” under which countries arrest foreign nationals on their soil and prosecute them for atrocities, irrespective of where the crimes were committed.
Weeks after Floderus was arrested and while the trial was still ongoing, Iran said it planned to execute an Iranian-Swedish scientist, Ahmad-Reza Djalali. He had been arrested much earlier and charged with spying and aiding Israel in assassinating nuclear scientists.
That month, Iran executed another Swedish-Iranian, the dissident Habib Chaab, who had been living in Sweden for more than a decade and was abducted during a visit to Turkey in 2020 and smuggled to Iran. An Arab-Iranian, he was charged with anti-state activities.
Some of the European Parliament deputies who oversee EU policies on Iran expressed outrage that the case had been kept secret. “The imprisonment of a Swedish citizen and employee of the European Union is a scandalous event that urgently needs to be clarified,” said the chairwoman of the Parliament’s Iran delegation, Cornelia Ernst. “The commission, and in particular Josep Borrell [the EU foreign policy chief], must now explain how long they knew about the detention and why it was not made public,” she said.