More than 300 Iranian-American activists on Wednesday wrote to President Biden urging him to support a democratic and secular Iran, and not to ease sanctions until the regime in Tehran ends human rights abuses — as negotiations on reviving the Iran deal begin. “Your administration’s impactful actions must be directed towards blocking the Iranian regime’s violation of human rights, and their export of terrorism in the region and beyond,” the letter from more than 300 American-Iranians, including physicians, engineers and professors, says.
Facebook said Tuesday it has removed hundreds of fake accounts linked to an Iranian exile group and a troll farm in Albania. The accounts posted content critical of Iran’s government and supportive of Mujahedeen-e-Khalq, a dissident group known as MEK. In many cases, the Facebook and Instagram accounts used fake profile names and photos. Facebook determined the accounts were being run from a single location in Albania by a group of individuals working on behalf of MEK.
As Iran marks the 42nd anniversary of a referendum that helped to solidify its 1979 Islamic Revolution, there is growing talk inside and outside the country of a need for another referendum to spur change, but little agreement about who should conduct such a vote and how. Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, Iran’s first Islamist supreme leader who seized power from Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi in February 1979, ordered a national referendum to be held weeks later try to secure public approval for the question of whether or not to turn the nation into an “Islamic republic.”
Later this month, Bahareh Shargi will mark an anniversary: It will be three years that her husband has been stuck in Iran. Iranian authorities first imprisoned Emad Shargi, a U.S. citizen, on April 23, 2018. Though they eventually released him on bail, they did not allow him to leave the country and later returned him to Tehran’s Evin prison. Now his family hopes that speaking out may help him.
A German-Iranian woman was returned to solitary confinement at Tehran’s Evin jail on the eve of talks to revive the 2015 nuclear deal. Nahid Taghavi, 66, was taken from a mainstream women’s wing to a section of the jail controlled by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps in which she was previously held for five months. Her family believe the move was intended to put pressure on Germany, one of the signatories to the nuclear accord, as Iran pushes for the lifting of US sanctions at talks in the Austrian capital, Vienna.
The Iranian regime began increasing the number of women executed and female political prisoners exiled in the run-up to the Iranian New Year (Nowruz) on March 20. Since the start of 2021, the regime has executed five women, including Zahra Esma’ili, an innocent woman who took the blame for her teenage daughter who’d killed her abusive father, who was hanged after having a heart attack because she’d seen 16 other people executed in front of her. Another one of those executed was domestic violence victim Maryam Karimi.
Four Iranian Baha’i women in northeastern Iran were taken to prison to serve their sentences for following the banned faith. Nika Pakzadan, Sanaz Eshaghi, Nakisa Hajipour and Naghmeh Zabihian along with another Baha’i woman, Farzaneh Daneshgari were summoned on March 27 to serve their prison terms in Mashhad, northeastern Iran. They were told to present themselves within 10 days to serve their sentences. The five Iranian Baha’i women were each sentenced to one year in prison by the Revolutionary Court of Mashhad, In October 2020.
Three Kurdish men were executed in Iran’s western Azerbaijan province at dawn on Sunday. Sadiq Mahi, Ahmed Nematwand, and Mohammed Mahmoudi were executed by prison authorities at Urmia’s central prison after they were transferred to solitary confinement, the Human Rights Activists News Agency said on Sunday. They, along with three others, were sentenced on drug-related charges. The remaining three prisoners had their executions frozen for unknown reasons, the agency added.
The Iranian officials have increased their efforts to censor internet content and block social media in order to stop people from learning about protests or organise future ones, as the situation in Iran becomes more explosive. State Security Forces’ Special Forces unit commander Hassan Karami said on Monday that the regime’s enemies are using the internet to “infiltrate” Iranian culture, while Tehran prosecutor, Ali Alghasi Mehr, had previously expressed fear over how protesters were using social media channels to organise more effectively.
Quoting EU diplomats, the news agency said the sanctions, the first such sanction against Iran since 2013, include travel bans and asset freezes on individuals. The measure is expected to take effect next week, the report said. Asked by European Jewish Press about the report, a spokesperson for the EU’s external service declined any comment. ‘’We do not comment on discussion in the Council,’’ said Nabila Massrali. The EU has not sanctioned any Iranians for human rights violations since 2013, when an interim deal on Iran’s nuclear program was reached, despite major abuses, such as those detailed in a UN report earlier this month.
The US on Friday reiterated previous calls for Iran to release all American citizens detained in the country. The safe return of those detained in Iran or elsewhere was a “top priority” for Washington, Jalina Porter, State Department spokeswoman, said. “This weekend marks 2,000 days since Iran arrested Siamak Namazi for being a US citizen,” she said, adding he “was a businessman living in Tehran when he was arrested in October of 2015.”
A group of more than 300 prominent Iranian Americans are petitioning the Biden administration to publicly support dissident efforts to overthrow the Islamic Republic’s hardline clerical government. As the Biden administration seeks direct talks with Iran’s mullahs in pursuit of a revamped nuclear agreement, the group of Iranian Americans—including scholars, professors, physicians, and industry executives—is warning the White House against unwinding economic sanctions that have crippled Iran’s economy and sparked widespread anti-government protests.
Iran under the rule of mullahs has consistently maintained its status as the country with the world’s single highest rate of executions per capita. No other country apart from China, with its population of over a billion, exceeds Iran’s raw number of judicially-sanctioned killings each year. In 2020, Iran also took on the distinction of being one of the only countries to maintain its prior pace of executions in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic. According to one recent report by the Iran Human Rights Monitor, the total number of executions carried out in Iran last year was at least 267.
Iran’s Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif made headlines last week when he made a late-night appearance in Clubhouse, the increasingly popular group audio-chat mobile app. Even though hours into the conversation he said it was past his bedtime, the country’s top diplomat stayed longer to discuss issues that ranged from Iran’s recent controversial 25-year cooperation accord with China, to its nuclear deal with world powers, to again denying he has aspirations to become president, to his bedtime routine.
A number of Iranian military leaders, from both the army and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), are among the likely candidates for Iran’s presidential election, which will be held on June 18. Among these candidates are the former IRGC air force commander and former defense minister in the Rouhani government Hossein Dehghan; former IRGC commander and current Secretary of Iran’s Expediency Discernment Council Mohsen Rezaee; and the former head of the IRGC’s Khatam Al-Anbiya Construction Headquarters Brig. Gen. Saeed Mohammed, as well as other politicians with a military background, including Ali Larijani, Parviz Fattah and Mehrdad Bazrpash.
Last Friday a spokesman for the State Department made moving remarks about Siamak Namazi, an American held prisoner in Iran: This weekend marks 2,000 days since Iran arrested Siamak Namazi for being a U.S. citizen. Siamak Namazi was a businessman living in Tehran when he was arrested in October of 2015. When his father, 84-year-old Baquer Namazi, traveled to Iran to help free his son, the Iranian Government arrested him too.
فیس بوک سهشنبه اعلام کرد صدها حساب جعلی مرتبط با یک گروه تبعیدی ایرانی و یک مزرعه ترول در آلبانی را حذف کرده است. شورای ملی مقاومت حذف حسابهای کاربری متعلق به خود یا گروههای مرتبط به این شورا را تکذیب کرده است. به گفته این شرکت در بسیاری موارد برای این حساب ها در فیسبوک و اینستاگرام از اسامی و عکس های جعلی استفاده می شد. شورای ملی مقاومت گروهی که مجاهدین خلق را زیر چتر خود دارد در بیانیه اعلام کرده است که هیچ حساب وابسته به این شورا یا سازمان مجاهدین خلق حذف نشده است
نهادهای ناظر بر وضعیت حقوق بشر در ایران از اعدام دستکم سه زندانی در زندان ارومیه خبر میدهند. محمد کریم محمودی، احد حبیبوند و صادقی محی به اتهامهای مرتبط با مواد مخدر اعدام شدهاند. ارسلان یار احمدی مدیر وبسایت حقوق بشری هنگاو به بی بی سی فارسی گفت این سە زندانی روز گذشته به سلول انفرادی زندان ارومیه منتقل شده و خانوادههای آنها آخرین دیدار را با آنها انجام داده بودند. شبکه حقوق بشر کردستان نیز با تایید این خبر اعلام کرد حکم اعدام دو زندانی دیگر ابراهیم نصیرخواه و مصطفی نصیرخواه که برای اعدام به سلول انفرادی منتقل شدهاند به اجرا درنیامده است.
شرکت آمریکایی فیسبوک اعلام کرده است که صدها «حساب جعلی» مرتبط با یک گروه ایرانی در تبعید و یک «مزرعه ترول» آنها در کشور آلبانی را از این شبکه اجتماعی حذف کرده است. خبرگزاری آسوشیتدپرس روز سه شنبه ۱۷ فروردین گزارش داد، حساب های کاربری حذف شده، علیه دولت ایران و در حمایت از «سازمان مجاهدین خلق» مطلب منتشر می کردند. براساس این گزارش، در بسیاری از این موارد، حساب های فیسبوک و اینستاگرام، از اسامی و عکس های تقلبی در پروفایل های خود استفاده می کردند. مجموعا بیش از ۳۰۰حساب، صفحه و گروه در فیسبوک و اینستاگرام توسط این شبکه اجتماعی حذف شدند. به نوشته آسوشیتدپرس، فیسبوک تشخیص داده است که حساب های کاربری جعلی از یک نقطه واحد در آلبانی و توسط گروه و یا افرادی از جانب «سازمان مجاهدین خلق» اداره می شود.
سازمان عفو بینالملل روز چهارشنبه در جدیدترین گزارش خود درباره وضعیت حقوق بشر جهان در سال گذشته میلادی، از جمله در ایران، ضمن اشاره به موارد معمول نقض حقوق مردم در کشورهای مختلف، از تاثیر همهگیری کرونا بر آن میگوید. در بخش خاورمیانه و شمال آفریقای گزارش، گفته شده است که دولتها در سراسر منطقه در پاسخ به همهگیری کووید-۱۹ وضعیت اضطراری اعلام کرده یا قوانینی برای اعمال محدودیتهای نابجا بر آزادی بیان تصویب کردند و افراد به دلیل انتقاد از واکنش حکومتها به این بیماری، تحت آزار و اذیت و پیگرد قانونی قرار گرفتند.