Olivier Vandecasteele carefully considers every word he uses. The Belgian humanitarian had stayed silent since his release from Iranian prisons, where he was detained for 455 days, in May 2023. Today, he is willing to talk about his imprisonment, but also about his desire to move forward. He told Le Monde about Protect Humanitarians, an initiative he just launched in Belgium, on Thursday, March 14, to support humanitarian stakeholders. "Since my release, I have given priority to rebuilding my life and working on my project, which was born before my arrest and which I nurtured during this period," he explained, sitting in a Parisian café before a folder filled with documents.

Before Iran, Vandecasteele, 43, worked in Mali and Afghanistan. In 2015, he moved to Tehran as a director for the Norwegian Refugee Council, working with Afghan migrants, whose unverifiable numbers are estimated at around 2 million in the country. Five years later, he headed the NGO Relief International before returning to Belgium. In February 2022, he returned to Iran for a few days on a tourist visa to close his bank account, empty his apartment and collect his belongings. He was arrested by Iranian intelligence services while there.

"I had invited a few friends to my place to say goodbye. The agents who came to arrest me were hiding behind the pizza delivery man we were expecting," he recounted. The plainclothes officers refused to show him an arrest warrant.

The humanitarian was then taken to the notorious Evin prison in northern Tehran. He spent nine months there in total isolation, before being transferred in August 2022 to a safe house, in a three-bedroom house where he stayed on his own. There, he sometimes felt the presence of other people he never met.

No procedures were respected during his detention, starting with the very rare telephone conversations he was allowed with his family in Belgium, and the very few and equally rare consular visits he was granted. Interrogations were laborious and often lengthy. Vandecasteele wrote hundreds of pages answering "the same questions over and over again" about his humanitarian activities. Behind the relentlessness of his jailers hid a desire to "wear him down" or "make him do something wrong."

"I kept telling them that during my six years in Iran, I had done nothing reprehensible and that they themselves were aware of all my activities," he said. "I would try to explain to them the situation of Afghan migrants living in their country and that it was Iran that had requested humanitarian aid from the European Union under the JCPoA" – the abbreviation of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, the nuclear agreement concluded in 2015 between Iran and the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, France, Russia and China, which lapsed after Washington's unilateral exit under President Donald Trump in 2018.

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