It has been five years now since Niloufar Bayani was detained on charges of espionage, sentenced and incarcerated for a decade in prison
Nilofar Bayani and the appeal made by UNEP. Photo: @andersen_inger / Twitter On February 18, 2023, media was agog with images of 12 cheetahs brought from South Africa to Kuno National Park in Madhya Pradesh. They joined the eight from Namibia that had been brought September 17, 2022. But even as India delights in having the cheetah back, far away, a young woman has been languishing in a cell in a notorious prison in Tehran, the Iranian capital.
Her name is Niloufar Bayani. She has been incarcerated in the Evin prison since February 2018. That is when she, alongwith seven other environmental conservationists, was sentenced to lengthy jail terms by the government of the Islamic Republic of Iran. They were accused of espionage.
Bayani, an alumna of McGill University, Canada, and the others had set wildlife camera traps to learn more about the critically endangered Asiatic cheetah. They had done so with the approval of Iran’s department of environment, according to an article dated February 6, 2023 by the McGill Daily, an independent student newspaper at McGill University.
“On January 24 and 25, 2018, Nilou and her seven colleagues were detained and accused of using camera traps for the purpose of espionage. But the cameras were all in remote areas, virtually devoid of any sensitive infrastructure, settlement or other possible targets,” the article noted.
All eight scientists worked for the Persian Wildlife Heritage Foundation, a non-profit working to conserve Iran’s wildlife and ecosystems such as the Asiatic cheetah. One of them, Iranian-Canadian Professor Kavous Seyed-Emami died under suspicious circumstances. He was then in the custody of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard.
On February 13, Inger Andersen, the executive director of the United Nations Environment Programme, took to her Twitter handle to plead the regime in Tehran to release Bayani, who had worked as a consultant based out of UNEP’s Geneva office.
It has been 5 years since our former @UNEP colleague #NiloufarBayani was imprisoned in #Iran. Taking note of pardons recently issued by Iranian authorities, I renew my plea for her release. Env. conservationists are critical to making #PeaceWithNature. https://t.co/2JBBzbFm3H pic.twitter.com/hfseYXkrsb
— Inger Andersen (@andersen_inger) February 13, 2023
In the five years that Bayani has been at Evin, details have filtered out about her condition.
“Letters boldly leaked by Nilou mirror former detainees’ accounts of the prison’s abusive conditions — she details extreme mistreatment including an eight-month stay in solitary confinement, 1,200 hours of interrogation, and threats of physical torture, execution and sexual assault,” the McGill Daily piece noted.
Since Bayani is an Iranian citizen detained in her own country, her release in the form of a prisoner swap is not possible.
“We learned from a book written by a former cellmate, Kylie Moore-Gilbert, that watching birds from the prison courtyard is a favourite pastime of Nilou’s,” according to the article.
The McGill Daily demanded the immediate release of Bayani and her colleagues. But that may be easier said than done. Iran has been rocked by protests since September last year when authorities beat a woman named Mahsa Amini to death for wearing her hijab (headscarf) “improperly”, according to media reports. The protests have continued into February 2023.
Down To Earth spoke to conservationists about Bayani.
Ghazala Shahabuddin, ecologist, said the incarceration of Bayani and her colleagues should be condemned as they were scientists working to save a species on the brink of extinction.
“In fact, Iran should seek help from the outside world to save the Asiatic cheetah. If not the west, it can at least approach neutral countries such as those in Africa, which are also home to cheetah populations,” Shahabuddin told DTE.
A South African cheetah expert declined to comment, given the sensitivity of the issue. An Iranian scientist, who works in the west, told DTE he did not know Bayani well enough to comment.
Hassan Akbari, Iran’s deputy environment minister, had said in January last year that the Asiatic Cheetah was down to just 12, from an estimated 100 in 2010, Arab News had reported.
A female Asiatic Cheetah named ‘Iran’ had given birth to three cubs in captivity, a first for the subspecies, on May 1, 2022. The cubs were delivered by caesarean section at the Touran Wildlife Refuge in the Semnan province east of Tehran, IRNA (Islamic Republic News Agency) had reported.
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