The European Union (EU) had put him forward as a poster boy to encourage young Swedes to come and work in the institutions in Brussels. On Monday September 4, the New York Times revealed that Johan Floderus, a 33-year-old European civil servant, has been in prison in Iran since April 17, 2022 – over 500 days. After vacationing in the country with some Swedish friends, he was arrested at Tehran airport. Accused of espionage, he is being held in the notorious Evin prison in the Iranian capital.

Neither the Swedish Foreign Ministry nor the European External Action Service (EEAS), which the Swede belonged to, would confirm his name. "We never refer to individual cases," said Peter Stano, a spokesperson for the EEAS, "but we can confirm that Iran has arrested a Swedish national. We are sparing no effort to help him." In Stockholm, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, which denounced the "arbitrary detention" and demanded that the young man be "released immediately," said it was in "almost daily contact with the family" and was working "closely with the EU."

In May 2022, the Swedish authorities announced the arrest of a man of Swedish nationality in Iran, but gave no further details. A few months later, in July 2022, Teheran confirmed that it had detained the young man, accused specifically of having met with people placed under surveillance by the Iranian authorities and of having visited Israel.

But it took more than a year for his identity and function to be revealed. After a stint from 2019 to 2021 in the office of Ylva Johansson, the European Commissioner for Home Affairs, the senior civil servant had rejoined the EEAS to work for the EU delegation in Afghanistan. However, his departure for Kabul was cancelled, following the evacuation of Western nationals when the Taliban returned to power in the country in August 2021, and he has been working on these issues from Brussels ever since, according to the New York Times. He had also made several previous visits to Iran.

Like dozens of other Western nationals or dual nationals, Johan Floderus is imprisoned "for political reasons" in Iran as part of Iranian "hostage diplomacy," which consists of arresting foreign citizens under the pretext of espionage, then negotiating their release in exchange for benefits, whether in the form of money – on August 10, the United States obtained the release of five nationals in exchange for access to a sum of $6 billion linked to the sale of oil, which had previously been frozen by the United States – or the release of Iranian nationals in the countries concerned.

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