The EU’s General Court on Wednesday blocked the registration of the name “Pablo Escobar” as a trademark, upholding a ruling from the Intellectual Property Office (EUIPO).

A Puerto Rican company linked to Escobar’s family had filed to trademark the name of the notorious Colombian drug lord in the EU in September 2021.

The applicant argued that names such as Bonnie and Clyde, Al Capone and Che Guevara have already been registered as EU trademarks and that, “Pablo Escobar, because of his many good deeds for the poor in Colombia, has become a mythical figure in mainstream popular culture.”

Escobar, a narco-terrorist who was killed in a shootout in 1993, was the leader of the infamous Medellín Cartel and over decades of drug-trafficking became one of the world’s leading cocaine barons.

Wednesday’s court decision came after EUIPO previously refused to accept the registration as Escobar’s name, and what the European public associates with it, contradicted EU values.

“EUIPO rejected the application for registration on the ground that the mark was contrary to public policy and to accepted principles of morality,” a press release from the Court of Justice of the European Union said Wednesday, adding that EUIPO had relied on the perception of the Spanish public.

According to the court, “reasonable Spaniards, with average sensitivity and tolerance thresholds” who shared European values “would associate the name of Pablo Escobar with drug trafficking and narco-terrorism and with the crimes and suffering resulting therefrom.”

In its original decision in February 2023, EUIPO also referenced a ruling in which the registration of a restaurant chain called “La Mafia se sienta a la Mesa” (“The Mafia sits at the table”) was refused in 2018 because it could be perceived as immoral by the average citizen.

The General Court added that, “Pablo Escobar’s fundamental right to the presumption of innocence has not been infringed because, even though he was never criminally convicted, he is publicly perceived in Spain as a symbol of organised crime responsible for numerous crimes.”

Last month, critics of Eric Adams who’ve wanted the camera-friendly, hard-partying mayor to publicly answer for his tough-on-crime agenda got some catharsis. Adams appeared on the popular hip-hop morning radio show The Breakfast Club alongside an activist and political commentator named Olayemi Olurin. She held Adams verbally captive from the jump, needling the mayor for bragging that New York City is safe while also using “fearmongering” rhetoric to justify a bigger police presence. “Is it safe or is it not?” she asked. The mayor, so used to deploying charisma or bluster to evade criticism, instead stuttered, squirmed in his chair, and turned his back on Olurin to face the show’s hosts. “You would realize how I turned the city around if you follow everything I do,” Adams told Olurin. “I would say ‘no,’ but we can get to that,” she snapped back.

Olurin had been preparing for this moment for years. Since Adams’s election she’d used every available platform, from social media to op-eds to media appearances, to attack his handling of Rikers Island, the migrant crisis, homelessness, and bail reform. (AOC is a “big fan” and John Oliver once gave her a shout-out on his show.) For the better part of 50 minutes, she forced Adams to explain his support for policies that criminalize poor Black New Yorkers. Any time he questioned her facts, Olurin, a former public defender, cited reports and statistics to back them up. The dressing-down came at a particularly vulnerable time for Adams, with his approval rating in the toilet, a federal investigation into his campaign looming, and a sexual-assault lawsuit to fight. “Someone call in a wellness check on the Eric Adams comms team,” one reporter wrote on X after the interview aired. The former editor-in-chief of Rolling Stone called it “the most important interview of Eric Adams in a long, long time.”

On a sunny Friday afternoon the following week, I meet up with the 30-year-old to take a walk in Flatbush, one of the Black working-class communities Adams claims to represent and where Olurin lives. We pass the bodega where they know her sandwich order (Salsalito turkey with Sazón, jalapeños, and cheese) and a boutique filled with mannequins wearing colorful head wraps where she recently got her measurements taken for a dress. “It’s so Caribbean and it reminds me of home,” the Bahamas native tells me. She says “hi” to strangers as she bounds down the street. “I literally walk my neighborhood any time of night,” she says. “Never has any crime happened to me, I’ve never felt unsafe, none of that.” In just five minutes of walking, we see six cops. Olurin points out a police van and two officers standing guard outside a playground where three boys are playing basketball. “He becomes mayor and this is what we get,” she says. “This is a Black neighborhood. And so we have an exorbitant amount of police.”

When I say I hate Eric Adams, it really means I hate what he stands for. If Eric Adams resigned tomorrow, you would never hear me say his name again.

Lately, Olurin feels like she has a target on her back. The NYPD’s top brass have been going after her on social media since the interview, in which she’d said Adams seems to care more about a cop who was recently killed during a traffic stop than the “at least seven” civilians killed by NYPD officers this year. “This ‘Movement Laywer’ [sic] epitomizes everything that true NYers are against !” the NYPD’s chief of patrol wrote on X; the deputy commissioner piled on. Watching the NYPD lose “the fight in the court of public opinion online,” she says, “makes me nervous. Are these people gonna retaliate and do something in real life.” As an attorney, Olurin is well aware of her rights. But as a Black woman, she also knows that officers could violate those rights at any time. For two weeks, Olurin didn’t go out on her daily five-mile walk. Her doctor told her she was under high stress and gave her a heart monitor. She took down the Bahamian flag hanging outside of her apartment window, worried that officers would find out where she lives. “They’ll probably identify me,” she says. “How many Bahamian Nigerians are there?”

Inside her apartment, though, Olurin is at ease. Wearing a shirt that says “May all the motherfuckers who spite me burn in hell for all of eternity,” she sits cross-legged on a purple couch, the walls around her covered with images of Tupac, Malcolm X, and characters from Dragon Ball Z and The Boondocks, all made by Black artists. She tells me she was raised by strict parents who saw three career options for their five children: doctor, lawyer, or engineer. Olurin was the natural debater of the bunch. To watch a Harry Potter movie, she had to convince her grandmother via PowerPoint presentation that the film wouldn’t corrupt her brain. She also coaxed her parents into letting her attend high school in the U.S. so that she could more easily become a lawyer. At her West Virginia boarding school, Olurin was voted “most opinionated,” which came as something of a shock. Bahamians tend to be boisterous, so “I never thought of myself as a loud person that has this animated personality,” she says, raising her hands.

She was also the only Black girl in her high-school senior class. Olurin remembers one of her classmates saying that “Black people can’t swim and that we like chicken and watermelon or whatever.” Bahamians are always in the ocean and have no preference for either of those foods; she was confused. “I hadn’t figured out the word racist yet,” she says. “I knew something wasn’t adding up, but it was hard for me to navigate.” She went on to Ohio University, where she minored in African American studies, watched the Ferguson protests unfold, and decided to become a public defender so that she could help fight systemic racism.

Once she moved to New York for law school, Olurin was so broke that she struggled to afford subway fare. “I understood deeply what it was like to be poor in the city,” she says, “and to have that be received so negatively.” After graduating in 2018, she got a job with the Legal Aid Society, where she spent her days arguing that her clients didn’t deserve jail time for petty crimes like jumping a subway turnstile. In 2021, she posted a video that appeared to show an NYPD officer kneeling on one of her client’s necks to Twitter. She got the charges dismissed, and the media attention made her realize she could have more of an impact on the criminal-justice system by becoming an advocate. She was also becoming disenchanted with Legal Aid. “It’s incredibly stressful. It’s incredibly underpaid,” she says. Olurin quit at the end of 2022 to become, as she puts it, a “professional loudmouth.”

While paying her bills with a full-time job helping criminal-justice reform advocates to craft their messaging in the media, she started a YouTube channel last year. It hosts lively podcasts where she and guests debate topics like, “Are More Black People Becoming Republican?” as well as political deep-dives, including a two-hour-long magnum opus branding Adams “the Worst Mayor in America” over his support for racist policing policies like stop and frisk. She has a loose-lipped, energetic style in these videos that’s a stark contrast to the talking heads on cable news. She swears, wears bright-red lipstick, and calls herself “a bitch who’s chronically online.”

Olurin first appeared on The Breakfast Club in 2022 to talk about criminal-justice issues. After she criticized the program for platforming Candace Owens in March, co-host Charlamagne tha God called Olurin and invited her back to square off with the mayor. She doubted Adams would actually show up to their interview — “I think I am his loudest critic” — but threw herself into prep anyway. She sourced every stat she planned to quote, from the 31 people who have died on Rikers Island on Adams’s watch to the $17 million he cut from the jail’s programming budget. A defense attorney “has to be in tune with the facts,” she says. “A cross-examination is basically being able to call out the discrepancies.”

I understood deeply what it was like to be poor in the city, and to have that be received so negatively.

It still came as a surprise to Olurin when Charlamagne told her Adams was en route to the studio. “Don’t hold back,” he told her. “Ask him whatever you want.” She viewed this as permission to go scorched-earth, a luxury she knows many members of the City Hall press corps don’t have. “I went into it with the recognition that this is never happening again,” she says. She did her best Olivia Pope impression — “I had to give all Black people the version of a lawyer they like to see” — and though the left praised her for delivering a knockout, Olurin thought she was “nice and polite” to Adams. “In a normal world, I wouldn’t let you shout over me,” she says. “This is me giving grace.”

Olurin hasn’t gotten any of the agent, book-deal, or pundit-contract offers that can come with viral fame since the interview aired, though. “That says a lot to me about what the media is really invested in seeing.” While she’d love a plush commentator job at a big network, Olurin’s not surprised that her phone isn’t ringing; she says “it’s often the media helping steer this ‘copaganda.’” (Olurin is, however, doing a one-off CNN appearance to analyze the Trump hush-money trial.) She feels the biggest payoff from the appearance has been attracting tens of thousands of new followers. “I feel like I always had a large white audience by virtue of being a lawyer,” she says. “But this allowed a lot of Black people who weren’t previously familiar with my work to see it.” Her ultimate goal is to have “an advocacy version of Issa Rae’s career,” she says. “I want to have my own production company and have my own platform that’s big enough to garner the traffic.”

Olurin stresses that her beef with Adams is not personal. “When I say I hate Eric Adams, it really means I hate what he stands for,” she says. “If Eric Adams resigned tomorrow, you would never hear me say his name again.” That said, it may be just a little bit personal. She and Adams exchanged numbers after the interview at Charlamagne’s urging, and the mayor texted her a few hours later to ask about the origins of her name. She told him it’s Nigerian and means “affluence befits me,” to which he responded with a yellow-skin-toned prayer-hands emoji. She found the detail “incredibly telling,” given that Adams “uses his Blackness as a convenience to sell us on, but who has no real attachment to it or community.” “I’ve never in my life seen a Black person not change the color of this emoji,” she says. “That tickled me greatly. I laughed.”

I fully support Rachel Cohen’s ideas here about turning our many abandoned malls into housing.

Amy Casciani, a longtime real estate developer whose corporation built housing across seven states, watched her local community struggle for years to add new homes.

Casciani grew up in upstate New York, in a suburban town outside Rochester. She eventually started a family and raised her children there, and in the early 1990s, a new mall opened up, bringing over 100 new stores including anchor retailers like Sibley’s, J.C. Penney, and Sears.

The mall was a proud boon to the town of Irondequoit, and a go-to spot for teenagers to hang out. “Hands down the most attractive shopping mall in the area,” an editorial for a newspaper serving Albany declared. “From its blue Legolike entrances and splashing fountain to its light-trimmed glass roof, columns and carousel, the mall exudes carnival gaiety.”

But in a few short years, retail patterns across the United States began to change. Mall foot traffic slowed and online shopping ticked up. Stores in the Irondequoit Mall began to close, and by 2016, the last major anchor, Sears, called it quits.

Casciani ached for her town, which not only was dealing with the eyesore of the abandoned mall but also lacked enough vacant land to develop desperately needed affordable housing. Her nonprofit development group, PathStone, embarked on a complex but meaningful project: They retrofitted the Sears department store into 73 rental apartments and built a new four-story multifamily building with 84 rental units on the adjacent parking lot.

PathStone connected the two buildings by a raised pedestrian walkway, and the Skyview Park Apartments now serves adults 55 and up who need subsidized housing. Half of the units are reserved for seniors at risk of homelessness, who can receive on-site supportive services.

“As affordable housing needs and costs keep going up and a shortage of available vacant land is growing, why not use what we already have?” Casciani said. “Why not creatively turn it around from being a blight on the community to an asset?”

Across the country, policymakers, researchers, and real estate developers are paying more attention to mall conversions like the one in Irondequoit as they grapple with their own shortage of affordable housing. While the Irondequoit Mall was a traditional mall, strip malls in particular offer some unique advantages, like big empty parking lots, that could make housing redevelopment an easier task.

A report last fall from Enterprise Community Partners, a national nonprofit focused on increasing housing supply, estimated that strip mall conversions could create more than 700,000 new homes across the United States.

There’s so much broken in our discussions about the housing issue, mostly which has to do with everyone having a single talking point that is far too simplistic. One thing that connects a lot of these issues is issue of space. When a person buys up 5 old New York apartments and turns them into his personal fiefdom, that’s a lot of housing that is taken off the market. When everyone wants 2,000 square feet of housing, that really limits what we can do. But also, we have often struggled to retrofit previous disastrous uses of space (and the endless decaying malls, both traditional and strip), is a great example of this.

Here in Rhode Island, where what was once a state of density, the postwar housing boom turned huge parts of what is today Warwick and Cranston into completely unplanned strip malls that are today are decrepit, empty, or just look like shit because they are 50 years old, were poorly planned in the first place, and are half or less full. And yet, for all of our very real housing problems, none of this so far as I can tell has been converted into housing. It’s right there!

The post Let’s Turn Abandoned Malls into Housing! appeared first on Lawyers, Guns & Money.

Rep. Clay Higgins (R-Louisiana), the nastiest thing to come out of Louisiana since the state’s petrochemical industry, took a brave stand in defense of his fellow toxic emissions last week, with a tweet calling for EPA Administrator Michael Regan to “be arrested the next time he sets foot in Louisiana,” because the EPA last week rolled out tough new limits on cancer-causing pollutants spewed by chemical plants across the country. It’s a big fuckin’ environmental deal, it really is.

During an April 5 speech in Philadelphia previewing the new regulations, Regan said, “I’m excited to say that in the coming weeks, we’re going to announce a really strong regulation addressing those chemical plants in Cancer Alley," using the nickname for an infamous 85-mile industrial corridor between New Orleans and Baton Rouge where cancer cases are far higher than in the rest of the nation. Fifty-one of the 200 plants that will need to clean up are located in Louisiana, and about that many are in Texas, next door.

A normal politician might celebrate the EPA’s estimate that the new regulations will reduce elevated cancer risk by 96 percent for people living near chemical plants that emit dozens of carcinogenic chemicals, particularly ethylene oxide and chloroprene. Instead, Higgins wanted to send Regan away to Louisiana’s maximum security prison, Angola.

Gee, we wonder what part of this screenshot of the Times-Picayune story set Higgins off so badly?

Could it have been the headline, “'Really strong' pollution reduction measure planned for Louisiana, EPA head says”? Or maybe the fact that an announcement that will affect Louisiana was made in the Yankee enclave of Philadelphia? Or possibly the fact that the photo, from 2023, shows Regan, who is Black, speaking in front of one of the state’s worst chemical plants as if he had any kind of authority?

Wow, Higgins was steamed! He tweeted,

“This EPA criminal should be arrested the next time he sets foot in Louisiana. Charge his ass with extortion. LARS 14:66. I’d charge him a count for every Louisiana employee he’s threatening. Send that arrogant prick to Angola for a few decades.”

Rep. Higgins, a cancer ally who has been in Congress since 2017, has apparently not yet been briefed on the EPA’s authority to regulate harmful pollutants under the Clean Air Act. Worse, he appears not to know that even Black men are allowed to serve as agency heads these days, even if he thinks they look “arrogant” in a photo.

To be sure, the new regulations will have an economic impact in addition to causing less cancer, and that’s the other reason Higgins is so mad. Sure, there may be fewer cases of cancer among the poor Black people living in Cancer Alley, but what about all the money that chemical companies will have to spend to bring their operations into compliance? Are a few tens of thousands of unimportant people’s lives and health really worth the disruption?

As NPR reports, the regulations will be especially terrible for one good decent job-creating polluter, Denka Performance Elastomer in St. John the Baptist Parish, right in the middle of Cancer Alley. The company is America’s sole producer of chloroprene pollution, from its production of neoprene, “a synthetic rubber used in things like beer koozies and wetsuits.”

Won’t someone think of the beer koozies and wetsuits?

Chloroprene exposure levels near the plant are some 400 times the amount the new rules allow. A 2016 report determined that the Denka plant’s emissions contributed to the highest cancer risk anywhere in the USA.

In addition to the new rule, the EPA and Justice Department sued Denka last year, alleging its emissions present “an imminent and substantial endangerment” to people in surrounding communities. That suit has not yet gone to trial, and we can’t determine whether Rep. Higgins called for any of the prosecutors to be sent to break rocks on a chain gang.

NPR notes that the Denka plant is right next to an elementary school whose students are predominantly Black, some of whom may even be arrogant.

Community activists have praised the new rules as long overdue; Sharon Lavigne, fonder of the environmental action group Rise St. James in a neighboring parish, said the federal government largely ignored pollution in mostly-Black communities before Regan became the head of the EPA:

"In St. James Parish, there is a 10-mile radius where a dozen petrochemical facilities operate near the homes of Black residents," Lavigne said. "This is environmental racism."

The new rules will also require real-time air monitoring along the boundaries of chemical plants, which Lavigne said will improve notification of the nearby communities, allowing “the opportunity for us to have input on the steps taken to ensure compliance and reduce air pollution.” As of yet, Ms. Lavigne remains free, despite this clear threat to extort chemical plants into not killing her family with toxic air.

While plants that emit ethylene oxide will have two years to meet the tougher standards, which will require significant improvements to their equipment, Denka faces a 90-day compliance order, with a chance to apply for an extension. Pity poor Jason Hutt, an attorney who represents Denka, who is very sad about the prospect of reducing carcinogenic pollution that’s been harming residents for decades:

"It would be really nice if we could get back to the science and not the politics of the situation," Hutt said, "because there's a lot of people's livelihoods and jobs that are at stake in this outcome."

The EPA's rule, Hutt said, would shutter the Denka plant because the company won't be able to comply with the standards fast enough. That translates, he said, to more than 100 local jobs lost, as well as tax revenue. Denka has also been in a long battle with the EPA, disputing the health impact of chloroprene, arguing the agency is regulating based on "faulty science."

Honestly, it’s really arrogant and selfish of people in St. John the Baptist Parish to think that their children’s health matters more than 100 jobs, to say nothing of the potential damage to the beer koozy industry.

Better lock ‘em all up.

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[NPR / EPA / NOLA.com / ProPublica]

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This post was written by Alison Green and published on Ask a Manager.

It’s five answers to five questions. Here we go…

1. Our intern was working two full-time jobs

I work at a nonprofit and manage our internship program. I handle the administrative side of things, while our program teams handle the day-to-day/substantive work assignments and management.

I received a message from one of those teams this morning sharing that, through social media, they found out one of our paid interns has had another full-time internship this semester on top of her classes. She did not share this with us previously, to my knowledge. The director is very disappointed and wants to remove her from the internship.

The internship is hybrid (in office 2-3 days a week). She’s committed to working a set schedule for us and has been working those hours. I have less insight on the quality of her work day-to-day: she’s always responsive to and thorough with me on the admin side, and her team hasn’t given me any hints of performance issues. My understanding up to this point is that she’s been doing a good job in helping the program keep things on track for the semester (they’re very events-based and do a ton of planning and logistics).

While I’m concerned about the lack of disclosure, I’m wondering if there have been other performance issues I’ve been kept out of the loop on that are fueling the suddenness of this. I’m surprised she’s managed to balance two full-time internships and a full class load without anyone noticing prior to this, which is partly on me. Our program has three weeks left, and I’m unsure if this warrants a full removal given that we don’t have an explicitly stated policy against it. I’m new to both running this program and managing generally, so trying to get a sense of if I’m reading this right.

If she worked the hours she committed to working and there haven’t been concerns about her work quality or responsiveness, and if she hasn’t violated any policy about second jobs … why on earth does your director want to fire her? If there have been concerns about her work quality or responsiveness, by all means address those — and if they’ve been severe, this new info feels like it explains them, and it’s just the last straw, then sure, end things. But otherwise, there’s nothing here to be upset about, let alone to fire an intern over. If your organization doesn’t want people working other jobs, it needs to say that when it hires them— and it definitely needs to say that to interns, since it’s not uncommon for interns to have a ton of things going on. But based on what’s in your letter, it doesn’t sound like she’s done anything wrong, other than apparently violate an unwritten secret rule that lives in your director’s head.

2. Employee makes patients feel unwelcome

I have an employee who comes to get her clients from the waiting room and it’s hit or miss on how she greets them – with great enthusiasm or, more often and more likely, as Eeyore. She’s going back to school to get a terminal degree and, having done it myself, I know that’s draining, and she’s got some medical issues so I know there are days she doesn’t feel great. However, clients are asking to switch off of her schedule because they feel she is disengaged and uninterested in their care. It’s definitely affected our business – and it’s worse when she’s enthusiastic with one client and then dragging the next. Because of the nature of our business, there is some overlap between clients and they see how she acts with someone else and then comes so begrudgingly to them, like her feet are made of lead and her dog just died. (This is not always the case, sometimes she’s just an Eeyore all day.) This understandably makes the client uncomfortable and feel like they are unliked and/or a burden. Overall, we try and have a fun, positive environment in our office.

We’ve discussed this before, but is there anything we can do? I don’t want to tell anyone to “smile,” but how can we handle this when it’s affecting our business?

If clients are asking not to see her, that’s a serious problem. I agree you shouldn’t order anyone to smile, but it is reasonable to say that clients need to be greeted warmly and made to feel welcome and appreciated. How she achieves that is up to her; some people do that by being smiley and bubbly, but plenty of non-bubbly, more reserved people also manage to make clients feel welcome. She can adapt her approach based on her own style, but the outcome — that clients feel welcomed — shouldn’t be negotiable. (I’m also wondering what she’s like with her clients after she takes them back from the waiting room. I’m guessing you don’t see that part, and who knows what’s happening there.)

It sounds like it’s time for a heart-to-heart where you say that you know she’s juggling a lot but clients are experiencing her as gloomy and unwelcoming, and that can’t continue. Does she need time off? Fewer hours? Be open to hearing her out on what might help. But if she continues to make clients feel unwelcome, you’d need to treat it as a pretty serious fit issue.

3. My manager is upset that I’m paid more and get a benefit she doesn’t get

I work for a large international company and am one of the 20% remote associates. I am based in a high-income area, which most employees are not. I recently got a pay raise and a new manager. The raise pushes me over the high earner threshold to where I now get unlimited PTO. This pay discrepancy makes sense, as the cost of living is approximately double in my area.

My manager only was aware of this benefit because I brought it up to her, and it is clear she does not have it — she was totally blank-faced. She looked extremely upset on the call, and has repeatedly expressed how unfair this is. I agree with her and am actually being negatively impacted by this (it means I lose my banked PTO I wanted to use in addition to maternity leave), but don’t know how handle this with her.

Your manager shouldn’t be complaining about this to you! If she has a problem with it, she should escalate it to someone with the power to do something about it, not put someone she manages in the awkward position of hearing how unhappy she is about a perk they receive.

As for what to do, if she brings it up again, you could say, “I’d support you in pushing for it for everyone” (or if true, “If you decide to advocate for a policy change, you’d have my support”). And if she keeps bringing it up, it’s reasonable to say, “You’re putting me in a tough position since I didn’t choose this. Is there something you want me to do differently?”

4. I’m taking an extended break from work and my dusty LinkedIn profile is haunting me

I unexpectedly fell extremely ill in March 2023. I was a new grad (just got my MSW!) working a few part-time roles and searching for a full-time position when I totally dropped off the map to deal with my new fangled health mystery and profound disability (think daily cardio routine to a wheelchair overnight level of intensity). It’s a year later and I’m doing much better! I have a diagnosis and I’m improving every day, but it’s going to be a while before I’m back to full strength, probably another year or more.

My LinkedIn has just been sitting untouched this whole time and it’s haunting me. I’m still listed as “currently employed” at places I haven’t worked since the onset of my illness and that feels … So. Icky. Not being able to contextualize why I left my jobs so abruptly makes me feel absolutely batty. Even if I could get my head around that, I genuinely don’t know what cessation date to put down. Should it be the day I went on sick leave, or six months later when I finally resigned? Truly, there are more important things I could be thinking about I’m sure, but this is bugging me SO MUCH. Please help.

You are overthinking it! LinkedIn is a cesspool anyway and we should all deeply resent its existence. You don’t need it update it at all until you’re ready to start job-searching, but whenever you want to, your end dates can be the dates your employment formally ended (so not when you went on sick leave, but when you parted ways with the company; that’s what their records will reflect and yours can too).

5. Speaking Spanish in front of someone who doesn’t know the language

Is it legal for a boss to speak Spanish to someone who can speak English in front of someone who knows no Spanish, especially if there is a issue in hand?

Yes. No law requires people to use any particular language in their workplace.

In fact, legally, employers can only prohibit employees from speaking in another language if it’s justified by a business necessity, like when they’re waiting on English-speaking customers or doing team projects where an English-only rule will promote efficiency, or to allow a manager who only speaks English to monitor the performance of employees whose job involves communicating with others.

That doesn’t mean it’s polite or smart to speak in a language someone else doesn’t know, particularly in a small group where only one doesn’t know the language. But it’s certainly legal. (And there are times when it might make perfect sense, like when it’s the fastest/most efficient way to communicate something.)

The first time anybody realized Johan Floderus had been arrested was when he didn’t get off the plane.

The 33-year-old Swedish diplomat had arrived at Tehran’s Imam Khomeini International Airport to fly home after a week visiting friends in Iran. It took several days for his friends and family to work out he was in the feared Evin Prison — and more than a year before his arrest was made public.

Two years after his detention on April 17, 2022, Floderus — an employee of the EU’s diplomatic service — is still behind bars. Though he’s been accused of espionage, those familiar with his case say he’s more likely the latest example of Iran’s campaign of hostage diplomacy, in which Tehran arrests Westerners to exchange them for officials held in Europe for spying, terrorism or human rights violations.

Last December, Floderus was hauled in front of an Iranian court wearing grey prison fatigues to be accused of “corruption on Earth,” a wide-ranging set of charges that includes allegedly spying for Israel. Prosecutors for the Islamic Republic say they are seeking the death penalty.

As a diplomat with the EU’s External Action Service (EEAS), Floderus has received unofficial support from his colleagues who have campaigned for his release. But, given he was in Iran on a vacation rather than an official visit, the responsibility for securing his freedom has fallen to Swedish consular services.

“The Swedish Government and the Swedish Embassy in Tehran are working very intensively to secure Johan Floderus’ release. We are maintaining close contact with the EU,” officials in Stockholm told POLITICO in a statement. “Our efforts continue unabated, and we will not give up on them until Johan Floderus has been released and returned home.”

The question for Sweden — and the EU — is whether it’s willing to pay the price Iran seems to be asking for his release.

A long-standing relationship with Afghanistan and Iran

Floderus’ smiling face looks down from posters hung in public buildings in his hometown of Kungälv, a quiet, affluent community just 20 minutes north of Sweden’s second city, Gothenburg. “Help us bring Johan home,” the message reads.

For the past two years, his parents, Kerstin and Matts Floderus, have campaigned for their son’s release, first privately and then publicly.

The younger Floderus’ relationship to Iran stretches back to his childhood when the family had neighbors from the country who had a son of a similar age. “They were best friends, and Johan spent a lot of time at their house,” his father explained. “The mother made Persian food, which he was very fond of and that could well have been the start of his interest in the culture.”

During his military service, compulsory for most Swedish citizens, Floderus was accepted onto a military interpreter course where he was assigned to learn Dari, a Persian dialect spoken in Afghanistan where the country still had troops stationed.

After being discharged, his father said, he wanted to learn “real Farsi” and went to Tehran for a semester to study the language before eventually being admitted to Oxford University and London’s School of Oriental and African Studies.

Starting in 2018, Floderus worked for the EU supporting projects designed to help Afghan refugees arriving in Iran as the war between the Taliban and Western-backed government forces disrupted the lives of hundreds of thousands of people. The job came with travel to Tehran, where he met with Iranian officials and saw areas where fleeing Afghans were living, usually off-limits to foreign tourists, on at least four separate occasions.

After being quickly promoted through the bureaucracy, including a year and a half working in the Cabinet of EU Home Affairs Commissioner Ylva Johansson, he was offered a posting with the EEAS which would see him split his time between Brussels and Kabul.

Two years behind bars in Tehran’s Evin Prison

Every Iranian knows the name of Evin Prison. It is infamous as the jail that housed those denounced as enemies of the regime following the 1979 revolution and has been used to hold “arbitrarily detained male dual nationals and political dissidents,” according to Amnesty International.

Human rights groups accuse prison guards of arbitrary beatings, humiliating detainees and failing to give injured prisoners access to medical care.

“We write letters once a week,” said Matts Floderus. “For the first ten months, up until about a year ago, he was in isolation, and we know very little of what happened then. When he phoned us the first time — which was in February last year — he, among other things, said that ‘the first three weeks, I don’t want to talk about.’ So we don’t know where he was or what happened then.”

It was around the time of that first phone call that his family believes Floderus was moved into a cell in Ward 209, part of the prison observers believe is under the control of the ministry of intelligence and where many political prisoners have been held.

With no proper beds or bunks, Floderus uses four blankets — one to keep warm, one as a pillow and two as a mattress. The lights are kept on 24 hours a day, and detainees are blindfolded when they are moved around the facility, with exercise outdoors for 30 minutes a few times a week. With paltry rations of food, his family has tried to send him money to buy extras via the Swedish Embassy. “We also want an independent doctor to check up on his health and they have refused that,” said Matts Floderus.

The embassy has also tried to provide Floderus with reading material. “But [the Iranian authorities] are very reluctant about giving him books,” his father said.

The family has found support from Olivier Vandecasteele, a Belgian aid worker who was detained in Iran in 2022 and sentenced to nearly three decades in prison on spurious spying allegations. He was held for a year and a half in Evin Prison, where he shared a cell with Floderus for three weeks.

“I came out of more than 400 days of solitary confinement,” Vandecasteele said at an event in Stockholm in March. “I had a very strong desire to talk, and I could finally find someone to whom I could relate.”

“We both had experience of the same city — Brussels — so we could support each other a little bit by sharing memories from places we both know,” he said.

Hostage diplomacy leaves Western governments in a bind

Iran has not presented any evidence that Floderus is a spy, and his detention is being seen as part of Tehran’s long-standing strategy of taking hostages to obtain concessions from its adversaries.

The British-Iranian NGO worker Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe spent the best part of six years in Evin Prison, including nine months in solitary confinement, before she was allowed to leave the country in March 2022. Her release came the day after the British government paid a $500 million bill to the Iranian government as part of a dispute over the pre-revolutionary government’s 1979 order for hundreds of U.K.-made Chieftain tanks.

In September last year, five American prisoners were released by Tehran as part of a prisoner exchange that saw Washington unfreeze $6 billion of sanctioned Iranian funds.

Vandecasteele was himself released in May 2023, as part of an exchange which saw Belgium hand over former Iranian diplomat Asadollah Asadi, who had been convicted of plotting a bomb attack on an Iranian opposition rally being held in Paris.

“By and large this strategy has worked for the Islamic Republic,” said Alex Vatanka, director of the Iran program at the Middle East Institute. “They have always been able to use these hostages in the bargaining process that they engage in with adversaries, primarily Western states.

“Just in the last few months we’ve had a number of dual citizens released in return for billions of dollars of frozen Iranian money from South Korea,” he added. “There’s a long list of examples and it’s been intensifying in the last few years as Iran’s relations with the West really nosedive.”

So if Floderus is a bargaining chip, what does Iran want in return?

Many familiar with the case believe that Tehran has linked his case to that of Hamid Nouri, a former Iranian prison official implicated in massacres of inmates ordered in 1988 by Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. As many as 5,000 people were believed to have been executed in prisons across the country, including in Evin.

Nouri, who served in the Islamic Revolutionary Guard in both Evin Prison and at Gohardasht, just outside the capital, was detained after landing at an airport in Stockholm in 2019, thanks to intelligence passed on to the Swedish authorities by prison survivors and dissidents.

A Swedish court convicted him of crimes against humanity and handed him a life sentence. Weeks before the trial concluded, Floderus was detained at Tehran airport.

“It’s been more than 30 years that survivors and families of the victims [of the 1988 massacres] have been trying to seek truth and justice both inside and outside of Iran — and the prosecution of Nouri in Sweden was really the first time any Iranian official was held accountable,” said Nassim Papayianni, a campaigner focusing on Iran for Amnesty International.

“We believe there’s very clear indications that the authorities are holding Floderus hostage to compel the Swedish authorities to swap him for the former Iranian official, Hamid Nouri,” he added.

Trading journalists and aid workers for spies and killers

Efforts to release Floderus have been slow going.

For the first year of his detention, his family agreed not to name him publicly out of fear it could undermine Sweden’s negotiating position. That decision later had to be reversed to maintain pressure on both Iran and Western officials, his family said.

Making the case more challenging is the deterioration of relations between Iran and the West in the wake of former U.S. President Donald Trump’s hard-line Tehran policy, said Tarja Cronberg, a former Finnish government minister and expert on international diplomacy.

“The least the Iranians were expecting was that there would be criticism of Trump and that trade, and humanitarian trades, would be taken care of by the EU,” she said. “And when none of that materialized, the Iranians sort of lost their interest and turned to the East, towards China.” Now it’s not obvious which levers Brussels can pull to force Iran to play by the rules.

The practice of hostage diplomacy leaves Western governments in a bind — especially as realization grows among authoritarian countries that innocent foreigners like humanitarian workers and journalists can be arrested on trumped-up charges and then traded for convicted killers and intelligence assets.

That’s exactly what Russia did with the American basketball player Brittney Griner, who was detained on smuggling charges over a cartridge of medically prescribed hash oil then exchanged for the Russian arms dealer Viktor Bout. It also appears to be Moscow’s tactic in detaining the Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich on fabricated spying charges. Russia reportedly wants to trade him for Vadim Krasikov, a Russian intelligence agent who was convicted of shooting and killing a Chechen dissident in a park in Berlin.

Most Western governments have policies of not negotiating with terrorist organizations or paying large sums for those kidnapped by criminal groups, precisely because they fear doing so will incentivize the targeting of their citizens. But when innocent people are held hostage by hostile states, it is politically untenable to leave them to languish in appalling conditions in a foreign prison.

Silent vigil: Calls mount for Floderus’ release

Floderus’ detention is a case in point. As the two-year anniversary of his arrest approaches, criticism of how it is being handled is mounting. 

While the campaign for his release is visible in Sweden, with signs and a website calling on supporters to write their governments, in Brussels — where he lived and worked — there have been few signs of awareness of his detention. Josep Borrell, the EU’s foreign policy chief and the head of the EEAS, Floderus’ employer, says he has raised the case “at every occasion and contact with the Iranian authorities.” But in public, EU officials with few exceptions have been silent.

Today, his friends and colleagues in Brussels plan to hold a silent vigil marking the day he was arrested. And calls are growing for something louder. 

“You need to make noise, you need to get out there,” said Bernard Phelan, a French-Irish travel consultant who spent seven months in a prison in Tehran last year after he was arrested on spying charges while working for an Iranian tour operator. “I spoke to Nazanin [Zaghari-Ratcliffe] after coming back, and she said exactly the same: This silent diplomacy doesn’t get anywhere.”

Asked to clarify publicly whether Sweden might be prepared to exchange Floderus for Nouri, or any other Iranian prisoner, the country’s foreign minister, Tobias Billström, told POLITICO the question wasn’t one for politicians to decide.

“I understand what you are alluding to,” he said. “Let me be very clear, what you are talking about is an ongoing legal process, I am in no capacity as a representative of the Swedish government and as a Cabinet minister to in any way get myself involved in legal processes which are completely separate from the government, so I have no comments on that.”

Unpicking the legal and political consequences of an exchange, as Floderus’ parents are finding out, isn’t a quick process. But with their son’s stretch in Evin Prison set to enter its third year, they don’t care how he gets released — as long as he does.

“We don’t know what tools are available for the government, but we want them to use all the tools available in the toolbox,” said his father. “We just want one thing: We want Johan back home as soon as possible.”