Despite a 26 percent drop in world executions in 2020, the number of death penalties carried out by Iran stayed roughly the same, constituting half of all executions in the world, according to a report issued by Amnesty International on April 20. Excluding China, countries in the Middle East remained among the world’s leading executioners last year, despite legal reforms in Saudi Arabia, mainly because of the high number of executions in Iran. Iran carried out 246 death penalties out of a reported 483 worldwide.
The son of Iran’s last monarch, exiled opposition figure Reza Pahlavi, has for the first time called on Iranians to consider creating an elected monarch position as part of any system that replaces the Islamic republic, while downplaying the prospect that he would serve in such a role. Iran’s largely exiled opposition groups have long been divided on the country’s future. Pahlavi supporters want him to head a revived Iranian monarchy while other activists want a new republic to replace the authoritarian Islamist one led by Shiite clerics who ousted the crown prince’s father in a 1979 revolution.
A group of athletes and human rights activists is calling on the IOC to sanction Iran’s Olympic program for what it says is the country’s long-running pattern of ordering athletes to avoid competing against Israelis in international events. The head of the United for Navid campaign, formed to protest the execution of Iranian wrestler Navid Afkari, sent a letter to IOC president Thomas Bach this week highlighting more than a half-dozen examples over the past 16 years of Iranian athletes intentionally losing matches that would set up meetings against Israelis, or withdrawing from competitions against athletes from that country.
Amnesty International says the use of the death penalty in 2020 was the lowest in at least a decade, though the “unprecedented challenges” of the COVID-19 pandemic were not enough to deter Iran and 17 other countries from carrying out executions last year. At least 483 people were known to have been executed globally, a decrease of 26 percent compared with 2019, the London-based human rights watchdog said in its annual global review of the death penalty published on April 21.
Prison authorities have put Maryam Akbari Monfared, an Iranian dissident serving a 15-year sentence, under pressure in Semnan prison where she was recently banished to. Political prisoner Maryam Akbari Monfared has been additional pressure since she was exiled from Evin Prison to the Prison of Semnan on March 9, 2021. Prison authorities monitor all contacts she makes with her family and children. Akbari Monfared is presently detained in the general ward of the Semnan Prison where she does not have access to her personal belongings.
Iran has set trial dates for two dual nationals, one British-Iranian and the other German-Iranian, in cases that may increase the pressure before the next stage of talks on the future of the Iran nuclear deal in Vienna. The news of the trials set for next Wednesday comes as the lead Iranian foreign ministry spokesman, Saeed Khatibzadeh, said at a Clubhouse event on Tuesday that Iran wants a big “all for all” prisoner exchange. The grand bargain would involve all dual nationals, including those Iranians held in the west, being released simultaneously.
Iran was elected Monday to the United Nation’s Commission on the Status of Women for a four-year term along with China, Japan, Lebanon and Pakistan. Cabo Verde, Egypt, Mauritania and Tunisia, and Costa Rica, Panama, Trinidad and Tobago were also elected to the commission for four-year terms. The Commission on the Status of Women is the “global champion for gender equality,” according to the organization. It works to develop and uphold standards in which all women can exercise their human rights. The commission focuses on issues it deems fundamental to women’s equality and attempts to promote the progress of women worldwide.
When the #MeToo movement started sending reverberations across the globe in 2017, Iranian women felt the campaign was still out of reach for many. That was until late last summer, when one by one, Iranian women started taking to social media with their own accounts of sexual abuse and harassment. Among those accused of misconduct was Mohsen Namjoo, dubbed the Bob Dylan of Iran. That story has resurfaced in recent days: in a leaked audio recording, Namjoo is heard saying “no doesn’t mean no”. We speak to women’s rights activist Sussan Tahmasebi about this polarising issue in Iran.
Iranian dissidents in Turkey are unsure whether the country is still a refuge after what appears to be a new wave of arrests and deportation orders targeting asylum seekers from the Islamic Republic. Afshin Sohrabzadeh, 31, a Kurdish political activist, faced torture and solitary confinement during seven years in prison in Iran before he managed to escape during a hospital visit and flee across the border to Turkey in 2016, followed by his wife the following year.
The situation of dual-nationals and foreign persons taken hostage and imprisoned by the Iranian government has not only remained unchanged, but in certain cases it has deteriorated, despite the new US administration’s approach to Iran and resumption of nuclear talks between the P5+1 and Iran in recent weeks. It is essential that the US and EU prioritize the release of these hostages, many of whom have been held in Iran’s prisons for years, in tandem with the nuclear negotiations with Iran.
Two members of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) were killed in clashes with armed opposition groups in western Iran on Wednesday night, media affiliated with the forces reported. “At 20:05 last night, the local [IRGC] forces clashed with anti-revolutionary elements,” the IRGC’s Hamza Sayyid al-Shuhada command center responsible for the Kurdish areas in west of the country said in a statement published in the semi-official news outlet Tasnim, noting that two of its forces and two opposition group members were killed in the altercation. The IRGC refers to a multitude of Kurdish opposition groups based mostly in the Kurdistan region as “anti revolutionary” and to its members as “soldiers of Islam.”
The landscape surrounding the Iran-Azerbaijan border is incredibly beautiful. These pristine, green hills, however, conceal widespread intelligence-gathering activity by the Mossad, according to foreign reports. On Tuesday, I toured the border at two points: the first at Fuzuli and the second at Zangilan. Both these areas were liberated in the 2020 Nagorno-Karabakh War, in which Azerbaijan expanded its border with Iran from 500 kilometers (310 miles) to 600 kilometers (373 miles). And if up until that war the ayatollah regime in Tehran struggled to monitor the gigantic, fenceless border with its neighbor, now this border is even longer.
As descendants of Abraham, we are all brothers and sisters. That is why we should all be united against the Iranian theocracy. Just as it unleashed the coronavirus against the defenseless population inside Iran, Tehran’s mullahs also want to infect the world with the virus of fundamentalism. We should build the necessary antibodies to resist it. Jesus Christ was to heal the “broken-hearted.” And God says in the Quran that Muhammad was sent to break the chains of humanity and to lift the heavy burden on them.
On March 31, when Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif made an impromptu appearance on Clubhouse, many were impressed by how quickly the room filled with eight thousand listeners (the maximum allowed on the audio-only app). Less than two weeks late on April 13, a more impressive turnout occurred on the same platform. Faezeh Hashemi Rafsanjani, a former member of parliament and daughter of one of the founders of the Islamic Republic, took to Clubhouse to voice her bitter critique of the clerical establishment. The room hit capacity within minutes. Other rooms opened on Clubhouse and other platforms—such as Twitter’s Spaces—to broadcast Faezeh’s question and answer session. In total, almost twenty thousand people tuned in.
برخی از سازمانها و احزاب سیاسی و مدنی، نهادهای فرهنگی و پژوهشی، رسانهها و ناشران ایرانی با حمایت از کارزار «نه به جمهوری اسلامی» خواستار انعکاس بیشتر این کارزار شدند و اعلام کردند «فریاد نه به جمھوری اسلامی در جایجای ایران طنینافکن شده است. بیش از ۱۱۵ سازمان و حزب سیاسی و مدنی، نهاد فرهنگی و پژوهشی، رسانه و ناشر، در حمایت از دستکم هزار و پانصد نفر از فعالان سیاسی و مدنی، هنرمند و ورزشکار، نویسنده و استاد دانشگاه، و شهروندان ایرانی که به کارزار «نه به جمهوری اسلامی» پیوستهاند، با انتشار بیانیهای اعلام کردند: «گسترش کارزار نه به جمھوری اسلامی در پیوند با دیگر حرکتھای سیاسی و مدنی، نویدبخش ھمسویی و ھمگرایی بیشتر مبارزات آزادیخواھانه و عدالتجویانه مردم ایران برای رھایی از جمهوری اسلامی است..»
۱۸۰ نفر از هنرمندان، نویسندگان، و کارگردانان سینما و تئاتر در ایران با انتشار نامهای خواستار لغو ۴۲ ماه حکم زندان رضا (نوید) میهندوست، نویسنده و کارگردان ایرانی، شدند. در این نامه که نسخهای از آن نیز به صدای آمریکا ارسال شده است، امضاکنندگان آن با اشاره به فیلم «تاج خار» به کارگردانی آقای میهندوست اعلام کردهاند که «اتهام ساخت یک فیلم مستند در ۱۲ سال پیش که تا کنون پخش و عرضه نشده است و در مورد خبرنگاری است که در آن ایام داخل کشور اقامت و فعالیت داشت، مصداق عطف به ماسبق محسوب می شود.» فیلم «تاج خار» به زندگی و فعالیتهای مطبوعاتی مسیح علینژاد، مجری و مفسر برنامه تبلت صدای آمریکا، در ایران میپردازد.
جمعی از بازنشستگان کارگری در اعتراض به شرایط بد معیشتی و عدم توجه به مطالباتشان مقابل ادارات تامین اجتماعی استانهای مختلف ایران تجمع کردند. کانالهای “اتحاد بازنشستگان” در تلگرام نیز به نقل از یک شاهد عینی گزارش داد که در تهران دستکم سه نفر از دو زن که از سخنرانان بودند، بازداشت شدند. اتحادیه آزاد کارگران می گوید از هویت این دستگیر شدگان اطلاعی در دست نیست. این چهارمین تجمع سراسری بازنشستگان از آغاز سال جدید شمسی است. معترضان در استانهای مختلف از جمله کرمانشاه، هرمزگان، خوزستان، تهران، اصفهان، البرز، کرمان، قزوین و خراسان رضوی به خیابان آمدهاند.
۱۸۰ در آستانه بیعت ۱۴۰۰، گروهی از فعالان سیاسی، نویسندگان و فعالان حقوق بشر (از جمله نویسنده این مطلب) متنی بسیار کوتاه را امضا کردند تا در میان مخالفان نظام جمهوری اسلامی نوعی اجماع به وجود آورند. ۱۱۵ سازمان و موسسه، بعدا از این کارزار حمایت کردند. البته مشخص است که میلیونها نفر دههها است که به این نظام نه گفتهاند؛ چه با شرکت در اعتراضات پرهزینه در داخل کشور، نوشتن مقاله و اظهارنظر، صدور اطلاعیه و بیانیه و چه با خروج از کشور که امواج آن انتها ندارد؛ اما مخالفان نظام، در مورد «نظام جایگزین»، «چگونگی گذار به نظام بعدی» و «نحوه رهبری جنبش براندازی» با هم همراهی و توافق ندارند. همچنین، ظرفیت گفتوگو و مصالحه و یافتن مخرج مشترکها میان «نه گویان» به جمهوری اسلامی، بسیار اندک است.