An Iranian court has handed British-Iranian charity worker Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe a new one-year jail sentence and travel ban on charges of spreading propaganda against the regime, her husband said on Monday. Zaghari-Ratcliffe was detained at a Tehran airport in April 2016 and accused of working with organizations allegedly attempting to overthrow the Iranian regime. She and her employer, the Thomson Reuters Foundation, repeatedly denied the charges against her, but she was convicted and sentenced to five years in jail.
Reporters Without Borders, the Paris-based advocacy organization, joined a growing chorus of Iranians to urge the release of veteran journalist and documentary filmmaker Mohammad Nourizad. “He is ailing and deprived from the right to treatment. His life is in danger,” read a post on the organization’s official Persian Twitter account. The statement accused Iranian authorities of “arbitrarily” imprisoning the 68-year-old activist following an “unfair” trial.
Iran’s election to the U.N.’s top women’s empowerment body this week despite having a poor record has drawn outrage from rights activists who criticized the Islamic republic’s treatment of women. The result of the secret ballot also has been met with silence from the U.S. In Tuesday’s vote, 43 of the 54 nations in the U.N.’s Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) elected Iran to the Commission on the Status of Women for a four-year term beginning next year. The commission is the U.N.’s principal intergovernmental body dedicated to “the promotion of gender equality and the empowerment of women.”
Two Iranians have been sentenced to death for allegedly insulting the Prophet Muhammad, according to a news outlet that covers news in Iran. The Human Rights Activists News Agency (HRANA) reported on April 22 that the two men were arrested and transferred to prison in Arak, the capital of Markazi Province, in May 2020. An Arak court convicted the pair of “insulting the prophet,” which carries the death penalty, the report said. It was not clear what the charge stemmed from.
Five men in Iran could have their fingers amputated as a punishment for stealing under the country’s brutal Islamic penal code. Behnam Sina and four others were found guilty of breaking into 22 homes across Tehran, the capital city. But under Iran’s Islamic Penal Code, amputation of limbs is considered a suitable punishment for theft. Of the 22 households burgled, eight were present during the court hearing. Six of the households demanded the return of their stolen property and called for the amputation of the thieves’ fingers if the property could not be returned.
Images recently posted on social media show several new graves being dug over the mass graves in Khavaran Cemetery where the authorities had buried political prisoners executed in 1988 massacre. At least two people have been buried in these graves in recent days in this area. Khavaran Cemetery is located southeast of Tehran, where members of Iran’s religious minorities, such as Christians or Baha’is, are buried separately from Muslims.
The state security forces have paraded 34 young men in the streets to punish them for attending the Iranian fire festival which was heled on March 16, the state-run IRNA news agency reported today. The public degradation was carried out in the northeastern Iranian city of Mashhad with the presence of Judge Seyed Hadi Shariatyar, Deputy of Crime Prevention of the Public and Revolutionary Prosecutor’s Office of Mashhad. On the eve of the last Wednesday of the Persian year Iranians gather to light bonfires in the streets and jump over the flames to celebrate the Iranian fire festival.
A court in northern Iran has sentenced two student activists to a total of 72 lashes. The Shahroud Criminal Court has sentenced 25-year-old Milad Nazeri and 26-year-old Seyed Shabir Hosseini Nik to a total of 72 lashes for their social media posts. The two activists are students at Shahroud University of Technology Central Campus in northern Iran. According to the verdict which was initially issued on December 29, 2020, the two student activists were sentenced to 36 lashes each for “participation in spreading lies with the intention of disturbing public opinion through the Telegram channel of the University’s Student Association”.
Two European dual citizens will stand trial next week in Iran on undisclosed charges as talks restart to try to revive the 2015 nuclear deal. Campaigners on behalf of German woman Nahid Taghavi, 66, and Briton Mehran Raoof, 64, said their cases should be highlighted before any new agreement over the nuclear deal is struck with Tehran. The pair were both arrested on October 16 after a round-up of activists in Tehran and have been held in the city’s Evin jail. Their lawyers, trying to discover what charges they face, are being denied access to their case files.
Iranian security agents have arrested 13 members of the banned Baha’i faith in Baharestan township in Esfahan on Sunday, searching their homes and confiscating personal belonging, the Human Rights Activists News Agency, HRANA based abroad reported. Agents confiscated laptop computers, cell phones, books and family photos from homes and from the detained individuals.
Compelling evidence has surfaced that now suggests the shooting down of Ukrainian Flight 752 by the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) in January 2020 was in no way an error but a premeditated intentional act, reported the King Weekly Sentinel. Since day one of the crash, Andre Milne with Unicorn Aerospace has been investigating and his evidence is now being used by the Ukrainian Anti-Terrorist prosecutor to determine if there are grounds to take Iran to the World Court for Crimes Against Humanity for shooting down PS752. Milne calls it a “premeditated” SAM attack on civilian Flight PS752 after takeoff outside Tehran.
Families of those who perished when Iran’s military shot down a Ukrainian airliner in January 2020 have expressed their anger at foreign minister Mohammad Javad Zarif for claiming he was unaware of why the plane had crashed. Iran International TV on Sunday released a three-hour recording obtained from sources, in which Zarif blames the Islamic Revolution Guard Corps (IRGC) and its late Qods force commander Qasem Soleimani for hijacking Iran’s foreign policy. The tape has led to a major scandal in Iran, dubbed by some as Zarifgate. In the tape, Zarif tries to present himself as an official kept in the dark about the incident.
A recording of Iran’s foreign minister offering a blunt appraisal of diplomacy and the limits of power within the Islamic Republic has been leaked, providing a rare look inside the country’s theocracy. The release of the comments by Mohammad Javad Zarif set off a firestorm within Iran, where officials carefully mind their words amid a cut-throat political environment that includes the powerful paramilitary Revolutionary Guard, ultimately overseen by the country’s supreme leader. Zarif has been suggested as a possible candidate for Iran’s June 18 presidential election as well.
More than 100 Iranian lawmakers wrote a letter to Majles Speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf that “figures in the budget bill have been altered several days after the bill’s final approval at the Iranian Parliament in late March.” The lawmakers revealed in their letter that a handful of other lawmakers have changed the figures with the approval of the Budget Committee chief. Earlier, a leading MP said that the changes were made in coordination with Ghalibaf.
Clubhouse, the invitation-only app billed as “a space for casual, drop-in audio conversations,” has attracted users from many parts of the world. Not everyone is a fan: the Anti-Defamation League says the app’s lack of moderation has attracted extremism and hate speech. But in Iran, Clubhouse has begun to catch on.
Activists have expressed astonishment over the election of Iran to the United Nations’ top forum for women’s rights, apparently with the backing of at least four Western democracies. “This is surreal,” Iranian women’s rights activist Masih Alinejad tweeted Wednesday after Iran joined the UN’s Commission on the Status of Women. “A regime that treats women as 2nd class citizens, jails them for not wearing compulsory hijab, bans them from singing, bars them from stadiums & doesn’t let them travel abroad without the permission of their husbands gets elected to UN’s top women’s rights body,” Alinejad wrote.
The state-run Iranian student news network SNN published an article this week saying that the People’s Mojahedin Organization of Iran (PMOI/MEK) is far more threatening to the regime than the explosion at the Natanz nuclear plant because the MEK is appealing to young people as well as encouraging mass protests and resistance activities. The SNN wrote: “The incident of destruction in Natanz was significant and thought-provoking. But we must be aware that much bigger destruction is going on, which, unfortunately, many are ignoring…”
The cherry blossom tree in our backyard has bloomed and withered for the third time since our dad, Emad Shargi, was first taken hostage in Iran. Our father, an American citizen who was born in Iran and left as a child, had returned alongside our mother temporarily to reconnect with the country of his birth. Three years ago, on the night of April 23, 2018, roughly 15 people stormed our grandmother’s house in Tehran and took our dad to Evin Prison, where he was held for eight months on fabricated charges.
With the US and Iran now embarking on ‘indirect talks’ in Vienna, the international community is intently focused on efforts to curb Tehran’s prospective acquisition of nuclear weapons. But another aspect of its malign conduct is posing a more immediate threat: Its state-sponsored terrorism, which has reached European soil. The most frequently recurring examples of Iranian terrorism come from open conflict zones like Syria, Yemen and Iraq. Meanwhile, Tehran’s longstanding terrorist proxy, Hezbollah, operates more or less freely in Lebanon. Looking back on the 1980s and 90s, Hezbollah also stands out as an example of how Iran-backed terrorism has reached as far as the Western hemisphere through attacks like the 1994 bombing of the Argentine-Israeli Mutual Association building.
Four decades ago, Iran took me and over 50 colleagues hostage for more than 444 days — since then, the regime has continued its “business” model of hostage diplomacy, without sufficient international condemnation and consequence. Today, the far reaches of this Iranian threat persist and extend as far as South Florida, where the family of the late Robert Levinson are left to grapple with U.S. failures to make his recovery and return — even in death — a priority.
When the Iranian authorities boast about Iran’s “resistance economy,” they are attempting to hide the fact that the government’s economic problems have deepened to a dangerous level. Iran’s official reserves dropped to a record low of $4 billion last year, down from $122.5 billion just two years earlier. This has partially contributed to the devaluation of the currency. Iran’s currency was trading at about 30,000 rials to the US dollar in 2018, compared to approximately 240,000 now. In the last two years, many companies have gone bankrupt as the government continues to increase its monopoly.
As the Biden administration focuses on renewed nuclear diplomacy with Iran, it runs the risk of missing clear signs that the Iranian regime is stepping up its activism in a crucial strategic theater: North Africa. That’s the warning I heard in Rabat, Morocco’s capital, where I traveled earlier this month at the invitation of the country’s foreign ministry. With a review of U.S. policy toward the North African nation now underway, with ongoing unrest in nearby Libya, and with rising instability in the adjacent Sahel region, the kingdom’s strategic agenda is already quite full. All of this made the degree of concern among local policymakers over what they view as an Iranian strategic offensive on the continent all the more striking. “It’s no longer accurate to just speak about Iran in West Africa,” one high-ranking official told me. “The Iranians are all over the continent now.”
Senator Marsha Blackburn has not devoted much of her time in office to Iran policy. But this week the Tennessee Republican offered some clarity on the issue when she introduced a bill aimed at preventing President Joe Biden from returning the U.S. to the 2015 Iran nuclear deal. “It’s time for Biden to wake up and realize that the U.S. cannot negotiate an honest agreement with Iran because they are a fanatical, anti-American regime,” her statement reads. “No amount of negotiating or ‘indirect discussions’ can change that.”
A new and rapidly growing popular rebellion is affecting the Iranian regime. On March 11 a statement signed by 640 eminent Iranians, some living within and some outside Iran, was posted on-line in English and Persian with the hashtag “No to the Islamic Republic”. It marked the launch of a new anti-government movement. The founding statement called for the overthrow of the Iranian regime, describing it as: “the biggest obstacle in the way of freedom, prosperity, democracy, progress, and human rights.”
فدراسیون بینالمللی روزنامهنگاران با اشاره به بازداشت و محکومیت برخی رونامهنگاران ایرانی اعلام کرده است که از زمان شیوع ویروس کرونا و بیماری کووید۱۹، پیگرد قضایی و فشار امنیتی بر روزنامهنگاران در ایران به ویژه در سطح محلی و همچنین بر خبرنگارانی که فساد در حکومت را گزارش میکنند، افزایش یافته است. در این گزارش آمده است که این نهاد بینالمللی روند رو به رشد آزار و اذیت قضایی «روزنامهنگاران ایرانی را که صرفا به وظیفه خود در زمینه اطلاعرسانی به شهروندان در ارتباط با موضوعات منافع عمومی میپردازند» محکوم کرده و از حکومت ایران خواسته است فورا سرکوب رسانهها را متوقف کند و به پیگردهای قضایی علیه کارکنان رسانهها پایان دهد..
همزمان با انتشار اخبار مربوط به عضویت جمهوری اسلامی در «کمیسیون مقام زن» که زیرمجموعه شورای اقتصادی و اجتماعی سازمان ملل متحد است، یک فعال حقوق زنان به صدای آمریکا گفت: «این تصمیم، تصمیم بسیار شرم آوری است. شعله زمینی، فعال حقوق بشر و مدافع حقوق زنان در گفتگوی اختصاصی خود با صدای آمریکا ضمن «شرمآور» خواندن عضویت ایران در «کمیسیون مقام زن» در سازمان ملل، به صدای آمریکا گفت: «متاسفانه پیامی که داده می شود پیام بسیار بدی است، جمهوری اسلامی تنهای کشوری است، که در این کمیسیون قرار خواهد گرفت و این حکومت، کنوانسیون رفع انواع تبعیض علیه زنان را هنوز تصویب نکرده است. ایران نه تنها این کار را نکرده بلکه به صورت کاملا سیستماتیک در جهت نقض حقوق زنان عمل میکند..»