Olivier Vandecasteele
Quick Facts
Biography
Olivier Vandecasteele is a Belgian humanitarian worker who was arbitrarily arrested in Iran on 24 February 2022. Following a sham trial, he was sentenced to 28 years in December 2022, then sentenced to 40 years in prison in January 2023. Vandecasteele was kept hostage in Iran for 455 days and was released on 26 May 2023. His case is considered to be "a flagrant violation of international law."
Career
Since at least 2006, Olivier Vandecasteele has worked for international humanitarian organisations, including Médecins du Monde, Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC), and Relief International. He has worked in India, Afghanistan, and Mali. In 2015, he became the country director of NRC's Iran operations, and assumed the same role in Iran for Relief International in 2020 and 2021. In that position, he distributed humanitarian aid during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Detention in Iran
Vandecasteele was wrongfully detained in Iran on 24 February 2022. On 5 July 2022, Belgium's justice minister Vincent Van Quickenborne claimed that Vandecasteele was being held on fabricated "espionage" charges.
In December 2022, the Belgian government stated that Iran had sentenced him to 28 years in prison, and then in January 2023, the BBC reported that he had been sentenced during a sham trial to 40 years in prison and 74 lashes for spying, money laundering, and currency smuggling. Vandecasteele denied the charges against him.
On 26 May 2023 it was announced that Vandecasteele had been freed following a prisoner swap with Asadollah Asadi, an Iranian ex-diplomat convicted of plotting a bomb attack against a rally of the Iranian opposition group National Council of Resistance of Iran in Paris; Asadi had been arrested in 2018.
Vandecasteele was kept in full isolation for 14 months, out of his 15 months of wrongful isolation, in a tiny basement cell without windows and with the light constantly on 24 hours a day. Amnesty International and experts of the United Nations said that Vandecasteele had been subjected to enforced disappearance, torture, and other ill-treatment.
