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Italy’s foreign ministry summoned the Iranian ambassador on Wednesday and urged the immediate release of an Italian journalist held in solitary confinement in Tehran.
Cecilia Sala, a 29-year-old freelance journalist for Il Foglio newspaper and a podcaster, reportedly spoke of the harsh conditions of her detainment in the notorious Evin prison, including having to sleep on the floor of her cell without a mattress.
Sala, who was in Iran on a journalistic visa, was arrested on 19 December on charges of breaching Islamic law.
The foreign ministry said that during the meeting with Mohammad-Reza Sabouri, Iran’s ambassador in Rome, it reiterated its requests for Sala to receive “dignified detention conditions that respect human rights” and for a guarantee that full consular assistance is permitted, including allowing Italy’s ambassador in Iran to visit her and “provide her with the types of comfort that have so far been denied”.
During a phone call to her parents on Wednesday, Sala said she only had two blankets, one to sleep on and one to fend off the biting cold, according to reports in the Italian press. She said food was being given to her through a crack in the door, that her reading glasses had been confiscated and that a neon light was on in her cell all day and night.
On Sunday in an interview with La Repubblica, a US state department spokesperson said Sala’s detention was allegedly a reprisal for the arrest of Mohammad Abedini Najafabadi, a Swiss-Iranian businessman and alleged arms trafficker with ties to the Iranian regime, on a US warrant at Milan’s Malpensa airport on 16 December. “Unfortunately, the Iranian regime continues to unjustly detain citizens of many other countries, often using them as political leverage,’’ the spokesperson said.
Italy’s foreign minister, Antonio Tajani, said the government was “working with great discretion to solve this extremely intricate problem”.
Sala has nearly half a million followers on Instagram and is a regular guest on Italian talkshows. She has covered among other topics the fall of Kabul and the return of the Taliban in Afghanistan, the crisis in Venezuela, the war in Ukraine and the conflict between Israel and Hamas.
Evin prison is known for the detainment of opponents of the Iranian regime, journalists and foreign citizens. Among the prisoners is Narges Mohammadi, the Iranian 2023 Nobel peace prize laureate, who said in an interview published on Thursday that she would publish her autobiography and was working on a book on women held like her on political charges.
Mohammadi spoke to the French magazine Elle in Farsi by text and voice message during a three-week provisional release from the prison on medical grounds after undergoing bone surgery.
“I’ve finished my autobiography and I plan to publish it. I’m writing another book on assaults and sexual harassment against women detained in Iran. I hope it will appear soon,” she said.
Mohammadi, 52, has been jailed repeatedly over the past 25 years, most recently since November 2021 on convictions relating to her advocacy against the compulsory wearing of the hijab for women and capital punishment in Iran.
She said the imprisonment had left a physical toll. “My body is weakened, it is true, after three years of intermittent detention … and repeated refusals of care that have seriously tested me, but my mind is of steel,” Mohammadi said.
She said there were 70 prisoners in the women’s ward at Evin “from all walks of life, of all ages and of all political persuasions”, including journalists, writers, women’s rights activists and people persecuted for their religion.
One of the most commonly used “instruments of torture” was isolation, said Mohammadi, who shares a cell with 13 other prisoners.
“It is a place where political prisoners die,” she said of Evin. “I have personally documented cases of torture and serious sexual violence against my fellow prisoners.”
