The European Union has imposed sanctions on eight Iranian militia commanders and police chiefs, including the head of the elite Revolutionary Guards, over a deadly crackdown in November 2019, the bloc said in its Official Journal on Monday. The travel bans and asset freezes are the first EU sanctions on Iran for human rights abuses since 2013, as the bloc had shied away from angering Tehran in the hope of safeguarding a nuclear accord Tehran signed with world powers in 2015. Their preparation was first reported by Reuters last month.
Thanks to a rare glimpse inside the Islamic Republic of Iran’s vast penal establishment in Tehran, Fox News has obtained exclusive information about Iranians condemned to harsh sentences for mere contact with Israelis, including, for one, a betrayal by Turkish intelligence — an alleged ally of the U.S. “A woman who was incarcerated in Tehran’s notorious Evin Prison — where the regime keeps most of its political prisoners — was arrested leaving the Israeli embassy in Ankara by Turkish intelligence,” a source told Fox News.
The Iranian public’s rage at the state-led crackdown on fuel price hike protests in November 2019 has only accumulated over the past 18 months, as authorities refuse to come clean or release any official report into the killings and abuses. A series of inflammatory comments and decisions by Iranian officials over the past week seems to have further intensified the fury.
In the past week, authorities in Iran hanged at least 17 inmates in different cities. Most of the executed persons were convicted to death on drug-related charges and their death penalties were carried out at Urmia Central Prison, in the northwestern Iranian province of West Azarbaijan. In some cases, authorities deprived death-row inmates of their basic rights like the last visit with their families. On Sunday, April 4, the government executed three inmates, Ahad Habibvand, Sadegh Mohi, and Mohammad Karim Mahmoudi, at Urmia Central Prison.
The Iranian Judiciary handed down long prison sentences to two protesters arrested during the November 2019 nationwide protests. Jalal Namdari, from Kermanshah, and Saeed Khaledi, from Paveh, were sentenced to a total of 13 years in prison for taking part in the anti-regime protests that sprung up following the government’s overnight tripling of fuel prices. Khaledi will serve three years for “acting against the national security and cooperation with dissident opposition groups” and another year for “spreading propaganda against the establishment”.
Political prisoner Golrokh Ebrahimi Iraee has been sentenced in absentia to an additional one year in prison. Branch 26 of the Revolutionary Court of Tehran issued a one-year sentence in absentia for political prisoner Golrokh Ebrahimi Iraee on the charge of “propaganda against the state.” Amol Prison authorities informed Ms. Iraee as she is being detained in the women’s ward of this prison. Ms. Iraee has been also punished by getting banned from membership in any political group or party and also banned from leaving the country for two years.
The court hearing scheduled to examine charges leveled against two elite and award-winning students detained in a security ward was called off. Ali Younesi and Amir Hossein Moradi, students of Tehran’s Sharif University of Technology, were violently arrested last year in April and taken to Evin Prison. They have been detained since in the notorious Intelligence Ministry Ward 209, and for a considerable period in solitary confinement. In mid-March, the court session was scheduled for April 11, 2021, said Mostafa Nili, the defense attorney representing Ali Younesi and Amir Hossein Moradi.
The European powers party to the Iran nuclear deal told Tehran on Wednesday that its decision to enrich uranium at 60% purity and install a further 1,000 centrifuges at its Natanz site were contrary to efforts to revive the 2015 nuclear deal.
Denmark’s public prosecutor said on Thursday it had charged three members of an Iranian Arab opposition group for financing and supporting terrorist activity in Iran in collaboration with Saudi Arabian intelligence services. The three members of the Arab Struggle Movement for the Liberation of Ahvaz (ASMLA) were arrested in February last year and have been in custody since. “This is a very serious case where persons in Denmark have carried out illegal intelligence activities and financed and promoted terrorism from Denmark in other countries,” public prosecutor Lise-Lotte Nilas said in a statement.
In a six-hour long conversation on the audio-chat application Clubhouse Tuesday [April 15] night, former Iranian lawmaker and political prisoner Faezeh Hashemi, the daughter of former president Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, praised Donald Trump, defended the Shah and said former president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad wanted her to be his vice-president.
Music runs in Marjan Greenblatt’s blood. The Iranian Jewish human rights advocate plays the piano and her mother is a lifelong violinist; her paternal grandfather played the tar, an Iranian long-necked instrument that resembles a guitar. At various points in Iran’s history, all non-liturgical music was forbidden to Muslims, while exceptions were made for the country’s Jews, Christians and Zoroastrians. “The Jewish community has been preserving the musical traditions [in Iran], because it was permitted for the Jews, even though it was banned for the Muslims,” Greenblatt, 49, told Jewish Insider in a Zoom interview this week.
A television station controlled by the Islamic Republic of Iran censored over 100 broadcast shots of a female referee during the Sunday British soccer match between Manchester United and Tottenham, sparking criticism on social media because of the regime’s sexism. Sardar Pashaei, a world champion gold medalist in Greco-Roman wrestling for Iran, tweeted: “Last night, Iran TV interrupted the important game between Manchester United and Tottenham dozens of times, censoring its images, just because one of the referee’s match was a woman (@SianMasseyRef)[Sian Massey]. Will @FIFAcom [International Federation of Association Football] voice its objection to this gender discrimination by Iran?”
Amnesty International called on Saturday for Iran to immediately release political prisoners and elite students Ali Younesi and Amir Hossein Moradi, who have been held on national security offences, “including gathering and colluding to commit crimes against national security and spreading propaganda against the system”, for a year. The human rights group tweeted: “For one year [Younesi and Moradi] have been held without trial in section 209 of Tehran’s Evin prison, under the control of the ministry of intelligence, and have been denied access to an independent lawyer of their own choosing.”
A British-based campaigner who helped detain an Iranian lawyer allegedly involved in the mass execution of thousands of political prisoners has provided international prosecutors with evidence for the arrest of nearly 20 regime officials. The secret list is believed to include Ebrahim Raisi, potential successor to supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and head of the Iranian judiciary, who has been identified as a key figure in the killings in Iranian prisons after the Iran-Iraq war ended in 1988.
The current Iranian parliament is only 5.7% female. Even those women who are MPs are from the fundamentalist faction, which is controlled by Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, and therefore represent misogynous attitudes and cruel policies. It’s therefore no surprise that they supported the Population Growth and Family Support Plan, which effectively marginalises women by making them stay home to have and raise children in order to raise the birth rate to at least 2.5 children per woman.
Last September, seven United Nations human rights experts wrote a letter to the leadership of the Iranian regime and called attention to the ongoing proliferation of issues related to the clerical regime’s massacre of political prisoners in 1988. The document noted that a number of that massacre’s perpetrators remain in positions of great power and influence to this day, due to a trend of impunity that has been actively promoted by regime authorities and has never been seriously challenged by the international community.
اتحادیه اروپا هشت فرمانده سپاه، بسیج و پلیس ایران از جمله حسین سلامی، فرمانده کل سپاه پاسداران را به اتهام دست داشتن در سرکوب مرگبار اعتراضات آبان ۱۳۹۸ به فهرست تحریمهای حقوق بشری خود اضافه کرد. این اتحادیه روز دوشنبه ۱۲ آوریل در اعلامیهای علاوه بر این هشت نفر، نام سه زندان را هم در ارتباط با نگهداری بازداشتشدگان اعتراضات آبان در این فهرست آورده است. در واکنش به این اقدام خبرگزاری فارس به نقل از سعید خطیبزاده، سخنگوی وزارت امور خارجه ایران، گزارش کرد که تهران این اقدام را “قویا محکوم” کرده و آن را “بیاعتبار” میداند. آقای خطیبزاده گفته است که در واکنش با این اقدام اتحادیه اروپا کشورش “گفتوگوهای جامع با اتحادیه اروپا شامل گفتوگوهای حقوق بشری و تمامی همکاریهای ناشی از این گفتوگوها، به ویژه در حوزههای تروریسم، مواد مخدر و پناهندگان را به حالت تعلیق در میآورد.
جمعی از فعالان صنفی و چهرههای سرشناس ایرانی با امضای فراخوانی، خواستار اعاده دادرسی مجدد اسماعیل عبدی، معلم زندانی در ایران شدند و از دیوان عالی خواستند حکم ده سال زندان صادر شده برای او را باطل کند. در این فراخوان که نسخهای از آن نیز به صدای آمریکا ارسال شده، آمده است که روند رسیدگی و شیوه برگزاری دادگاه این معلم زندانی به هیچ وجه منطبق با «موازین قانونی و شرعی» نبوده است. این بیانیه میگوید که پس از اعمال حکم ده سال زندان اسماعیل عبدی، حکمی که در سال ۸۹-۹۰ معلق شده بود، «در اقدامی عجیب و نامتعارف وی را از زندان اوین به زندان دیگری که حتی اولین و بدیهی ترین حقوق انسانی، طبیعی و شهروندی افراد را ندارد، تبعید کردهاند.
همسر افشین سهرابزاده، زندانی سیاسی سابق و پناهجوی ایرانی ساکن ترکیه که در خطر بازگردانده شدن به ایران قرار گرفته است، میگوید، که دولت ترکیه بدون هیچ مدرکی او را به «اقدام علیه امنیت ملی کشور ترکیه» محکوم کرده است و با همین اتهام میخواهند او را «دیپورت» کنند. فرشته تاجمیری، همسر افشین سهراب زاده، در گفتگو با صدای آمریکا گفت، حکم «دیپورت کردن و ۵ سال ممنوعیت ورود به کشور ترکیه» برای این زندانی سیاسی سابق و پناهجوی ساکن ترکیه، روز چهارشنبه ۱۸ فروردین ماه به اتهام «اقدام علیه امنیت ملی» صادر شده و او در خطر بازگردانده شدن به ایران قرار گرفته است. این حکم در حالی برای این پناهجوی ایرانی صادر شده که به گفته همسر وی تا به این لحظه برای آقای سهرابزاده جلسه دادرسی و دادگاه برگزار نشده است.