- Prison
- Evin
- Status
- Imprisoned
Niloufar Bayani, who worked as an expert at the Persian Wildlife Heritage Foundation, was arrested along with eight other environmentalists in a coordinated operation by the IRGC Intelligence Organization in the final months of 2017 on charges related to “espionage.”
Niloufar Bayani was born in 1987 in Tehran. She received her bachelor’s degree in biology from McGill University in Montreal, Canada, and her master’s degree in conservation biology from Columbia University in New York, where she also taught for a time. During her undergraduate studies she worked in a McGill faculty laboratory and spent a term in Uganda and Tanzania as part of McGill’s Africa study project, an experience that deepened her interest in environmental conservation. From 2012 to April 2017 she worked as a consultant on the international project “Ecosystem-based post-crisis risk reduction” at the UN Environment Programme in Geneva. In the summer of 2017 she returned to Tehran and began working as planning manager with the Persian Wildlife Heritage Foundation, and was arrested six months after her return to Iran.
Niloufar Bayani, the second defendant in the case of the imprisoned environmentalists, wrote in a letter drafted in early 2020 that IRGC intelligence interrogators, in order to extract fabricated confessions, subjected her to “at least 1,200 hours of interrogation” and to “the most severe psychological torture, threats of physical torture, and sexual threats.” In numerous letters to prison and judiciary officials, and even to Khamenei, she described the inhuman physical and psychological torture she endured, much of it involving sexual abuse.
In her “final defence” statement in autumn 2019, previously unpublished, she spoke of a constant fear that the sexual threats of the case’s lead interrogator would be carried out: “The videos are witnesses to how the main interrogator, using the alias Hamid Rezaei — whose name still makes my body tremble — treated me. Because of his shameless behaviour, every time the interrogations dragged on past nightfall, terror of a serious assault shook my being.” She added: “His unjustified and unexpected presence in places such as the dark corridor and the yard of the detention centre, and his repulsive behaviour, meant I never felt safe anywhere.”
In a separate letter dated 24 January 2019 to the then head of the judiciary, Sadeq Amoli Larijani, she stated that IRGC intelligence agents had explicitly told her they “would strike the mouth of any judge who read out a sentence other than the one written in advance by the IRGC.”
Along with the other environmentalists, she was held separately for 22 months in the IRGC’s Ward 2A cells at Evin prison. Their trial was held over five sessions between 30 January and 18 February 2019 at Branch 15 of the Tehran Revolutionary Court, presided over by Judge Salavati, with Bayani present at the first two sessions. She was sentenced in the first instance to ten years’ discretionary imprisonment, upheld on appeal. She is currently held in the women’s political ward of Evin prison.
