Thousands of workers in Iran’s vast energy industry have gone on strike over the past week to press demands for better wages and conditions at oil facilities, Iranian media reported Wednesday. The widespread demonstrations underscore the mounting economic pressures on the country as it struggles to secure relief from crippling sanctions. Footage has spread across social media showing construction workers at 60 oil and petrochemical installations, largely in the country’s oil-rich south, walking off their jobs in protest.
The U.N. investigator on human rights in Iran has called for an independent inquiry into allegations of state-ordered executions of thousands of political prisoners in 1988 and the role played by President-elect Ebrahim Raisi as Tehran deputy prosecutor. Javaid Rehman, in an interview with Reuters on Monday, said that over the years his office has gathered testimonies and evidence. It was ready to share them if the United Nations Human Rights Council or other body sets up an impartial investigation.
Iran’s use of the death penalty for crimes committed as minors does not mean it violates human rights, a senior Iranian official has insisted to AFP in response to UN criticism. The Islamic republic executes convicts for crimes they committed while under-age “three to four times” a year, argued Majid Tafreshi of the state-run High Council for Human Rights. Such uses of capital punishment are “not a symbol of violations of human rights,” he said in an interview with AFP, charging that criticism of the practice was “not fair”.
It was the worst news that anybody could have woken up to; as Sardar Pashaei reached for his phone one morning in September, he knew immediately that something terrible had happened. “When I woke at about six or seven o’clock in the morning,” he told CNN Sport, “I see a lot of phone calls from Persian television. And when I listened to the voicemail of my journalist friend, I just cried. I couldn’t control my tears.” The Iranian Pashaei, who was the 1998 Junior 60-kilogram Greco-Roman World Wrestling champion, has been living in self-imposed exile in the US since 2009.
Three Christians from the Church of Iran denomination have each been sentenced to five years in prison and fined four million Rials ($95) on Saturday. They were sentenced by the Revolutionary Court in Karaj, in the area of northern Iran, after being convicted of “engaging in propaganda against the Islamic regime.” The three men, named as Amin Khaki, Milad Goudarzi and Alireza Nourmohammadi, are all appealing their sentences. They were charged with “sectarian activities” during the trial, valid under a new amendment to the Iranian penal code.
On June 8, 2021, Iran’s Parliament passed the first draft of a bill that, if it becomes law, would impose the death penalty for those convicted of “spying or collaborating with enemy states,” specifically the U.S. The bill also criminalizes filming “crime scenes” and sending clips and images to “enemy or foreign networks,” designed to punish those who share visuals that could incriminate or embarrass the Islamic Republic of Iran, such as the killing of protesters by the security forces.
The Christian church in Iran is worried that it will most likely suffer increased persecution under the leadership of former Judiciary Chief Ebrahim Raisi who was elected as Iran’s president on June 18. Raisi, who won with 72% of the vote amidst the controversial elections, replaced Hassan Rouhani who could not be re-elected after serving two terms. The newly elected president is a 60 year old who has deeply conservative views on various social issues.
Iran’s Supreme Leader on Thursday appointed hardline cleric Gholamhossein Mohseni Ejei as the new head of the judiciary, state media reported, a body that enforces Islamic laws and is accused by rights groups of cracking down harshly on dissent. Ejei, a long-term judicial official and former intelligence minister, replaces Ebrahim Raisi, who is due to become president in early August after winning a June 18 election. Ejei’s appointment by Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei comes as Iran faces renewed criticism by Western human rights groups and international bodies over the election of Raisi, who is accused by critics of a series of abuses during his judicial career. He denies wrongdoing.
Oil and petrochemical workers from 60 companies across eight Iranian provinces are now on strike demanding higher wages and better contractual conditions, Iran International reported, adding that the strikes have been intensifying since last week. The London-based Iran-focused outlet explained that the strikes follow a change in the way people rehired in the country’s oil industry. Retiring full-time workers are being replaced with employees hired on a temporary contract basis.
Following the widely-boycotted presidential elections in Iran earlier this month, the Iranian people took to the streets to express their distaste for the government over many different issues. On Sunday, June 27, the country was rocked by protests from pensioners of the Steel Company, Social Security Organization, and Homa Airlines, as well as dairy farmers, Isfahan pharmacists, Bushehr Petrochemical structural workers, Gama company workers, oil and petrochemical workers, and the plundered investors of the Azico credit institution.
The Iranian Health Ministry reported 142 deaths from coronavirus on Monday, bringing the death toll to 83,985, but these figures are incredibly low, with the Iranian Resistance reporting that over 319,000 have perished from the virus. Many countries have taken robust action to stop the virus through mass vaccination, but the pandemic is still ravaging the country because the mullahs have failed to take the appropriate action. Iranian officials have recently started to talk about how the vaccination process has been slowed down considerably because of the mullahs’ insistence on using the domestic vaccine after Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei banned the import of Western vaccines.
The Iranian regime appointed noted criminal Ebrahim Raisi as president in June; a man best known for his role on the death commissions in the 1988 massacre of 30,000 political prisoners and his violent crackdown on the November 2019 uprising where 1,500 protesters were shot dead in the streets. The world has been reacting to the news of his presidency. The Secretary-General of Amnesty International Agnès Callamard said in a statement: “That Ebrahim Raisi has risen to the presidency instead of being investigated for the crimes against humanity of murder, enforced disappearance and torture, is a grim reminder that impunity reigns supreme in Iran.”
Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei praised on Monday incoming president Ebrahim Raisi’s record as judiciary chief, following the 18 June election. “Raisi’s actions during his mandate [as head of] the judiciary… rekindled the people’s confidence in this institution,” Khamenei said in a speech to judiciary officials, according to his website. Raisi was elected in the first round with nearly 62 percent of a vote that saw record low turnout for a presidential poll of just 48.8 percent after his main opponents were disqualified.
Ebrahim Raisi, winner of Iran’s presidential election, bears responsibility for the deaths of thousands of prisoners in Iranian jails in late 1988. He served as a prosecution member of a three-man “death committee” – as prisoners later termed it – which ordered executions of male and female members of an opposition group, and then of males who were atheists, communists or otherwise leftwing “apostates”. Women in this category were tortured until they recanted, or else died after continual whippings. Raisi, only 28 at the time, was Tehran’s deputy prosecutor and alternated on the committee with his chief.
Ebrahim Raisi’s election as president of Iran came as no surprise. All those who might have been a threat to him were disqualified. He was the choice of the supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, and small wonder: Few people better embody the ideology of the Islamic Republic. He will not open Iran up to the outside world, and will certainly not look to accommodate the United States in any way. As for Iran’s behavior in the Middle East, he has made clear that it is “not negotiable.”
Every American administration since the Iranian Revolution of 1979 has tried to find some way to accommodate and work with the Islamic Republic of Iran. More specifically, they have attempted to identify some working arrangement with the Supreme Leader, the regime’s ultimate authority and final word. Carrots in the form of economic inducements and sticks in the shape of sanctions relief have not fundamentally moved the needle in dealing with Iran. Only the perceived threat of an American invasion of Iran after the United States went into Afghanistan and Iraq in the early 2000s forced the Iranians to slow-walk some of their malign and nuclear activities.
Iran is at a crossroads today. After years of bearing the brunt of severe U.S. economic sanctions, it now faces the prospect of having those sanctions lifted amid negotiations in Vienna to restore the 2015 nuclear deal. At the same time, Ebrahim Raisi, an ardent conservative with a history of gross human rights abuses, will assume the Iranian presidency on August 3 after perhaps the most stage-managed election in the Islamic Republic’s history. While there will be calls for the U.S. to abandon efforts to restore the Iran nuclear accord and engage Iran diplomatically, now is a moment when diplomacy with Iran will be more important than ever.
اعتصابات سراسری کارکنان صنعت نفت در ایران همچنان ادامه دارد و شورای سازماندهی اعتراضات کارگران پیمانی نفت اعلام کرده است از آنجا که درخواستهای معترضان بیپاسخ مانده، اعتراض و اعتصاب تا زمان رسیدن به مطالبات ادامه خواهد داشت. همزمان، اعتراضات متعدد صنفی و مدنی دیگری در شهرهای مختلف کشور در جریان است. بر اساس بیانیه شورای سازماندهی اعتراضات کارگران پیمانی، کارکنان رسمی وزارت نفت از تاریخ نهم تیر به اعتصابات سراسری خواهند پیوست واگر تا پایان مرداد ماه خواستههای معترضان برآورده نشود، دامنه اعتراضات گستردهتر خواهد شد. در این بیانیه از کارگران اعتصابکننده که محل کار خود را ترک کردهاند، خواسته شده با بازگشت به خوابگاههای خود، از استخدام نیروهای جدید جایگزین توسط شرکتهای پیمانکاری جلوگیری کنند..
سید مجید تفرشی، معاون امور بین الملل ستاد حقوق بشر جمهوری اسلامی ایران، به خبرگزاری فرانسه گفته است که اعدام کودکمجرمان «نقض حقوق بشر محسوب نمیشود» و انتقاد از آن «منصفانه نیست. آقای تفرشی همچنین افزود، «سه تا چهار بار» در سال محكومان را برای جنایاتی كه زیر سن قانونی مرتكب شدهاند اعدام میكنند. او در این مصاحبه با خبرگزاری فرانسه که روز چهارشنبه ۳۰ ژوئن منتشر شد، گفت: «زمانی که از افراد زیر ۱۸ سال صحبت میکنیم، منظور ما کودکان پنج شش ساله نیست. بلکه پسران بزرگ ۱۷ سالهای است که دادگاه آنها را بالغ تشخیص داده است. سازمان ملل متحد و گروههای مدافع حقوق بشر به صورت مداوم از جمهوری اسلامی ایران به دلیل اعدام کودک مجرمان، که نقض کنوانسیون حقوق کودک سازمان ملل متحد محسوب میشود، انتقاد میکنند
سه نوکیش مسیحی به جرم «فعالیتهای گروهی» به «اقدام علیه امنیت ملی» محکوم شدند. دادگاه انقلاب کرج روز شنبه پنجم تیرماه امین خاکی، میلاد گودرزی و علیرضا نورمحمدی را در مجموع به ۱۵ سال زندان و ۱۲ میلیون ریال جریمه نقدی محکوم کرد. بر اساس ماده ۵۰۰ قانون اساسی هر تبلیغی علیه جمهوری اسلامی که به نفع گروهها و سازمانهای مخالف آن انجام میشود فعالیتی مجرمانه است و بین سه ماه تا یک سال حبس خواهد داشت. در این ماده قانونی صحبتی از پیروان ادیان و ممنوعیت فعالیت آنها نشده اما در بهمنماه سال ۹۹ الحاقیهای به آن افزوده شد که طبق آن هر نوع فعالیت دینی که مغایر با دین اسلام باشد نیز جرم محسوب میشود