An ancient sport, wrestling has long electrified Iran and the United States. Yet in 2020, the Islamic Republic executed the decorated Greco-Roman wrestler Navid Afkari for his role in a 2018 protest against corruption in the theocratic state. The contrast between the world’s worst state-sponsor of terrorism, according to the U.S. State Department, and the dissident Iranian athletes who honored Afkari in Tokyo could not be greater. On the one hand, in a video posted by Iranian-American journalist Masih Alinejad on Twitter, Vahid Sarlak, who defected from the Islamic Republic and now coaches Tajikistan’s national judo team, said from Tokyo, “I wanted to do a small gesture for an Iranian champion.
An Iranian Revolutionary Court has sentenced two dual nationals, German-Iranian Nahid Taghavi and British-Iranian Mehran Raouf, to more than 10 years in prison, each on national security charges, their lawyer said on Wednesday. Iran’s elite Revolutionary Guards have arrested dozens of dual nationals and foreigners in recent years, mostly on espionage and security-related charges. They have accused the Islamic Republic of trying to win concessions from other countries through arrests on security charges that may have been trumped up.
A group of opposition and human rights groups from Iran slammed the European Union for its decision to send a senior diplomat to the inauguration of Ebrahim Raisi, Iran’s new president. “The EU cannot be credible on human rights if it celebrates Ebrahim Raisi as president of Iran,” a statement said. It was posted online and shared on social media. According to the statement, the EU decided to send a senior diplomat, Enrique Mora, for the inauguration of Raisi.
Efforts to release Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe from an Iranian jail may have met a new hurdle after Iranian media reported Tehran had withdrawn a prison-swap offer to western countries. British-Iranian national, Mrs Zaghari-Ratcliffe was first jailed in Tehran in 2016 on spying charges, which she has always denied. On Tuesday, as the new Iranian hardline President Ibrahim Raisi was sworn in, the Iranian Nour news site reported that Tehran had shelved plans to release Ms Zaghari-Ratcliffe and other Iranian-British prisoners, in a sign that British relations with Iran may be more difficult under Mr Raisi.
Iranian authorities have secretly executed a young man who was a child at the time of his arrest and had spent nearly a decade on death row, Amnesty International has learned. Sajad Sanjari was hanged in Dizelabad prison in Kermanshah province at dawn on 2 August, but his family were not told until a prison official asked them to collect his body later that day. In August 2010, police arrested Sajad Sanjari, who was then 15, over the fatal stabbing of a man. Sajad Sanjari said the man had tried to rape him and claimed he had acted in self-defence, but in 2012 he was convicted of murder and sentenced to death.
Over the past few years, Human Rights Watch has seen numerous governments wage disinformation wars to further their agendas. Journalists and human rights activists, including Human Rights Watch staff, face online harassment campaigns, including by state-funded troll armies, which seek to distract readers from governments’ serious human rights violations. Many trolls target women with sexist harassment and threats of violence. These campaigns often seek to personalize attacks on individuals and their work – and Iran is no exception.
Three more human rights attorneys in Iran were handed unjust prison sentences in July 2021 amid an ongoing campaignto eliminate due process for activists and dissidents by intimidating the lawyers who defend them, the Center for Human Rights in Iran (CHRI) has learned. At least four defense lawyers were imprisoned in the country on trumped-up charges as of August 2021 (Nasrin Sotoudeh, Mohammad Najafi, Soheila Hejab, and Giti Pourfazel), and at least two additional lawyers (Farzaneh Zilabi and Mohammad Hadi Erfanian-Kaseb) were prosecuted on false charges in June 2021.
More than 60 former Iranian political prisoners issued a statement on Monday expressing deep concern over conditions faced by detainees of protests in Khuzestan province in July. The 62 signatories referring to high summer temperatures, lack of appropriate facilities and the high number of prisoners in detention centers said they are concerned that past mistreatment of political prisoners can happen again in Khuzestan. Many political detainees in the past have been mistreated in Iranian prisons and some have died either as a result of torture or being deprived of health care.
Officials of the Islamic Republic have demolished three homes on Monday belonging to members of the persecuted minority Baha’i sect in the Sari region of northern Iran. The Human Rights Activists News Agency (HRANA) reporting the development said, “The systematic effort to force Baha’is to leave this region was the result of a meeting held one year ago by several government security organs in the area.” HRANA added, that the land on which the houses were built belonged to the three families since at least 1963, while the Department of Natural Resources has claimed that 14 parcels of land in the Roshankuh village were forests before. The ruling was used as an excuse to demolish the homes.
For Ali Hedieloo, a 40-year-old making wooden furniture in Iran’s capital, Instagram is more than just a surfeit of glossy images. Like an estimated 1 million other Iranians, it’s how he finds customers, as the app has exploded into a massive e-commerce service in the sanctions-hit country. But now, the social media platform has come under threat. Iran moved last week toward further government restrictions on Instagram and other apps, as hard-line lawmakers agreed to discuss a bill that many fear will undermine communication, wipe out livelihoods and open the door to the banning of key social media tools.
The wife of a British citizen held in an Iranian jail for four years has pleaded with UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson to show he “genuinely cares” by securing his release. Anoosheh Ashoori, 67, has been in “hell,” his family said, since he was arrested on a visit to Iran and later convicted of spying for Israel — charges he denies. He is now four years into a 10-year sentence in Tehran’s notorious Evin prison, which is often used for detained dual nationals.
As Iranian President-elect Ebrahim Raisi prepares to assume his responsibilities on Thursday, protests in Ahwaz over the ongoing water crisis and other problems have expanded across the country. Protests have spread to Tehran, Karaj, Tabriz, Esfahan, Bushehr, Lorestan and Kermanshah, among other governorates, reflecting the growing public frustration and deep social tensions in Iran. These simmering tensions will have repercussions domestically and overseas in the upcoming period.
An extremely conservative cleric is being inaugurated as president of Iran on Thursday. The cleric, Ebrahim Raisi, won a June election that had disqualified any potential rivals. Critics said Mr. Raisi’s victory had been engineered to reflect the choice of his mentor and ally, Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. The election called attention to the role of Iran’s president in a system of governance dominated by clerical leaders since the Islamic revolution that overthrew the American-backed monarchy more than four decades ago.
The social uprisings that took place in late July have dominated Iranian society in a domino effect and created new conditions for the government, the people, and the subversive forces. With a flashback to the social conditions before the Khuzestan uprising, we can examine the formation of uprisings. The nationwide boycott of the regime’s sham elections in June 2021 was a major blow to the religious tyranny by the Iranian people.
A delegation of Iranian expatriates, including former political prisoners, visited Israel last week for a solidarity mission to the Jewish state. The group was composed of political dissidents who oppose the current Islamic Republic of Iran’s autocratic regime. Their visit was arranged by the Institute for Voices of Liberty (iVOL). iVOL stated that the delegation’s tour of Israel was meant as a show of solidarity with Israelis over recent attacks carried out by the Islamic Republic of Iran-sponsored terrorist groups, including the Gaza Strip-based Hamas.
Iranian-Americans including members of the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI) held a rally on Capitol Hill, where speakers including members of Congress condemned Iran’s incoming president, Ebrahim Raisi. At a gathering in Union Square on Monday, Iranian-Americans who had seen family members killed by Iran’s government for various alleged crimes erected a memorial showing the faces of hundreds of those killed. In fiery statements to the crowd, speakers including both Iranian-Americans and prominent figures from Congress and the US political sphere condemned Mr Raisi and called for him to face international human rights charges.
August 3, 2021, marked the start of Ebrahim Raisi’s four-year term as president of Iran. The validation ceremony took place in the “Beyt” (Arabic for “house”) of the Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, as a prelude to Raisi’s inauguration. It was exactly 33 years ago, on August 3, 1988, when I found myself in the same room with Ebrahim Raisi. At the time, he was a deputy prosecutor of Tehran and a key member of what was known as the “Death Commission” in Gohardasht Prison located in Karaj — northeast Iran.
By adapting the Obama-era policy of “strategic silence” in the wake of the selection of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei’s enforcer Ebrahim Raisi as president of Iran, the Biden administration is tacitly endorsing his appointment, presumably in hopes of persuading him to return to the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, or nuclear deal, after his inauguration in August. The ballooning social protests across Iran, however, suggest that a return to “strategic silence” at this critical juncture could be as great a missed opportunity this summer as it was twelve years ago when the then Obama administration studiedly ignored the greatest threat to the Islamic Republic since its inception in 1979. A more productive policy might be to revisit the successful Cold War precedent, summed up in the word “solidarity,” for forward-leaning engagement with the Iranian people.
Despite more than 40 years of living under a rigid and repressive theocratic regime, Iranians are not people to take government failure or flagrant abuse of power lying down. Time and again they have demonstrated a willingness to stand up and be counted, defying the determined efforts of the state’s security forces to suppress any show of dissent. At the moment Iran is suffering the effects of a drought described as the worst in 50 years. According to the Iranian Department of Water and Sewerage, at least 110 Iranian cities have been struggling with cuts in water supplies during the summer of 2021.
Loathed by its own people, Iran’s theocratic regime has continued to maintain power through the cruel repression of domestic dissent. But subversive Iranian artists — in the Islamic republic and here in Canada — are working to change that. Since former prime minister Stephen Harper cut off ties with the regime in 2012, Canada has had little diplomatic engagement with Iran. In 2015, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau unwisely pledged to re-normalize relations, but those efforts have stalled — especially since the downing of Ukrainian Airlines Flight 752, which killed dozens of Canadians.
سیزده سازمان و تشکل سیاسی روز چهارشنبه بیانیه مشترکی را خطاب به ملت ایران منتشر کردند. در این بیانیه آمده است: «شما در بیش از ۴۲ سال گذشته، در راه رسیدن به یک زندگی انسانی در پیکار مداوم با حکومت انسانستیز اسلامی بودهاید. آنچه از سوی جمهوری اسلامی در این سالهای سخت فقر و خفقان و سرکوب به شما تحمیل شد، نتوانسته آرزوی رسیدن به آزادی، زندگی شایسته، و کرامت انسانی را در دلهای بزرگتان از بین ببرد. در بخشی دیگر از این بیانیه نوشته شده است: «اینک در شرایطی که شما اراده کردهاید تا کشورمان را از شر این رژیم ضد ایرانی و ضد بشری رها کنید، ما، گروهها و سازمانهای سیاسی مخالف با جمهوری اسلامی و باورمند به دموکراسی و سکولاریسم، تمامیت ارضی ایران و اعلامیه جهانگستر حقوق بشر، ضمن پشتیبانی از اعتراضهای شجاعانه و مسالمتآمیز شما، همسو و متحد اعلام میکنیم که به آرمانهای بزرگ ملت ایران وفاداریم.
جبهه ملی ایران، فرشگرد، حزب مشروطه ایران، انجمن اتحاد برای آغازی نو (جمعی از اعضای پیشین سازمانهای چپ)، سازمان برونمرزی حزب پان ایرانیست، حزب سکولار دموکرات ایرانیان، جمعیت سکولار دموکراسی برای ایران، زنان برای آزادی و برابری پایدار، حزب آزادی و رفاه ایرانیان و جمعی از امضاکنندگان بیانیه ۱۴ نفره از امضا کنندگان بیانیه مشترکی هستند که در آن بر اتحاد نیروها برای حمایت از خواستههای مردم ایران تاکید شده است. .۱۳ تشکل و حزب مخالف جمهوری اسلامی اعلام کردند که برای تحقق آرمانهای مردم ایران تلاش خواهند کرد تا به هماهنگی سازمانیافته دست یابند
ناهید تقوی، شهروند ایرانی-آلمانی و مهران رئوف، شهروند ایرانی-بریتانیایی که در ایران زندانی هستند، از سوی دادگاه انقلاب هر کدام به ۱۰ سال حبس به اتهام “مشارکت در اداره گروه غیرقانونی” محکوم شدهاند. علاوه بر این شعبه ۲۶ دادگاه انقلاب این دو نفر را به هشت ماه حبس تعزیری به اتهام “فعالیت تبلیغی علیه نظام” هم محکوم کرده است. مصطفی نیلی، وکیل دادگستری، همچنین خبر داده که این دادگاه سمیه کارگر و بهاره سلیمانی را به اتهام “مشارکت در اداره گروه غیرقانونی” به شش سال حبس و نازنین محمدنژاد را هم به همین اتهام به دوسال و هشت ماه زندان محکوم کرده است. هر سه نفر که پاییز گذشته دستگیر شدند، به اتهام “فعالیت تبلیغی علیه نظام” به هشت ماه حبس محکوم شدهاند.