Iran Human Rights (IHR), a Norway-based non-profit with members inside and outside Iran, in its most recent report published Wednesday said that the number of executions in Iran has gone up sharply after the presidential elections of June 18. According to IHR’s report, 89 of 117 executions in Iran in the past six months had been carried out secretly, with no announcements by officials of media. Of the 117 people executed, six were women and 111 men. “Executions were halted for nine days before the elections and resumed two days after,” the report said. “Iran Human Rights has previously warned of the correlation between political events such as the elections and a rise in the number of executions.”
Anti-regime protests have been underway in the Iranian Khuzestan Province because of extreme water shortages in the area. Activists have also cited marginalization by the regime because of ethnic differences, as the Ahwaz are Arab and primarily speak Arabic. Videos on Twitter show protesters lighting fires, demonstrating in the streets, and blocking roads as security forces attempt to disperse them, although the authenticity of these videos cannot be confirmed, in part due to Iran’s limits on information. The Iranian government has confirmed that two protesters have been killed, and activists claim that there was a third.
Iran is struggling with a fifth wave of the coronavirus pandemic, an economy strained by American sanctions and stalled talks on rescuing a nuclear agreement that was once seen as an economic salvation. Now the country is contending with a different but easily foreseen crisis: a severe water shortage. A prolonged drought and rising temperatures from climate change, combined with decades of government mismanagement of natural resources and lack of planning, have turned the water crisis into a volatile incubator of protests and violent unrest.
In a late June report, the London-based Amnesty International wrote in its comprehensive 45-page study about the “harrowing details of torture and other ill-treatment inflicted on unjustly jailed protesters Vahid Afkari and Habib Afkari since their arbitrary arrest in 2018.” The brothers Vahid Afkari and Habib Afkari “are serving lengthy prison terms in Adelabad prison in Shiraz, Fars province, following convictions in multiple grossly unfair trials, in which courts essentially relied on torture-tainted ‘confessions.”
An Indian Bahai body on Saturday flagged concerns over an increase in hate speech and propaganda targeted against its community members in Iran and asked the government of that country to stop the spread of misinformation. It said the ‘unfolding strategy to demonise’ the Bahai community is reflected in a growing and coordinated network of hundreds of websites, Instagram accounts, Telegram channels and Clubhouse Rooms.
Iran’s supreme leader Ali Khamenei last year decided to contract his government and started slowly to eliminate the figures of the so-called reformist faction in the hope of strengthening its government and being able to face upcoming protests and as well external crises. The final bullet of this decision was the appointment of Ebrahim Raisi as the regime’s president, not least because the overwhelming majority of the people of Iran boycotted the presidential election.
Mobile phone internet service in Iran is being disrupted a week into protests in the country’s southwest over water shortages, a monitoring group said Thursday, unrest that has seen at least three people killed. Internet-access advocacy group NetBlocks.org attributed part of the disruption to “state information controls or targeted internet shutdowns.” It identified the outages as beginning July 15, when the protests began in Khuzestan amid a drought affecting the oil-rich region neighboring Iraq. While landline service continues, NetBlocks warned its analysis and user reports were “consistent with a regional internet shutdown intended to control protests.” The effects represents “a near-total internet shutdown that is likely to limit the public’s ability to express political discontent or communicate with each other and the outside world,” NetBlocks said.
Protesters angry about water shortages took to the streets of southwest Iran for a sixth night in a row on Tuesday, with mounting violence, while Tehran residents chanted anti-government slogans, according to videos posted on social media on Wednesday and Iranian news outlets. Videos uploaded by social media users showed security forces using teargas to disperse protesters. The semi-official Fars news agency said “rioters” shot dead one policeman and injured another in the port city of Mahshahr in oil-rich Khuzestan province.
As protests by Iran’s Arab Ahwaz minority reach their fifth day and claim the lives of at least three protesters, the response by the international community remains limited. Protests erupted in the Khuzestan Province due to a drought that has devastated the region’s agriculture and way of life. However, according to Abdulrahman al-Heidari, the spokesperson for the Patriotic Arab Democratic Movement in Ahwaz (PADMAZ), the water issues were only a trigger.
After remaining largely silent about death threats targeting the Iranian-American journalist Masih Alinejad in 2020, the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists “strongly condemned” last week the alleged plot by Iran’s clerical regime to kidnap Alinejad. The CPJ’s spokesperson Bebe Santa-Wood sent The Jerusalem Post on Monday a statement the organization posted on its website on July 14 after the FBI revealed that Iranian regime intelligence operatives sought to kidnap the Alinejad.
At first, Masih Alinejad didn’t believe the F.B.I. The Iranian-born journalist and activist thought that she was safe after going into exile, in 2009, even as government propaganda continued to target her from afar. State television variously reported that she was a drug addict, accused her of being a spy for Western governments, and claimed that she had been raped in a London subway. Her parents and siblings, who remained in their village, in northern Iran, were repeatedly harassed, threatened with loss of employment, and instructed to lure Alinejad to neighboring Turkey for a “family reunion,” so that agents could supposedly “just talk” to her, she told me last week.
In a joint statement issued today, 14 international academic and human rights groups including Scholars at Risk and the Center for Human Rights in Iran called on the U.S. and European governments to secure the release of Iranian-born Swedish scholar Ahmadreza Djalali, who has been imprisoned in Iran since April 2016. In March 2021, UN human rights experts said Djalali was near death after months in solitary confinement.
A group of Iranian expatriates, including former political prisoners, will visit Israel this week to express their support with Israeli citizens after the recent clashes with Iran-sponsored Palestinian terrorist groups. The group of Iranians, who will arrive in Israel for a four-day visit on Monday will meet with Israeli officials in Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, and a number of other locations near the borders with Syria and the Gaza Strip. The mission seeks to “rekindle millenia-old ties between the people of Iran and Israel in defiance of the Islamic Republic’s ongoing genocidal antisemitism,” stated iVOL, which organized the delegation.
The supply of weapons from Iran to Hezbollah undermines Lebanon’s national security and poses a threat to the security of the US, President Joe Biden said Tuesday. The president served notice to Congress to extend the national emergency with respect to Lebanon, in place since 2007, beyond its termination date of Aug. 1, 2021. “Certain ongoing activities, such as Iran’s continuing arms transfers to Hezbollah — which include increasingly sophisticated weapons systems — serve to undermine Lebanese sovereignty, contribute to political and economic instability in the region,” Biden’s message to the Federal Register said.
Slovenia holds the six-month EU presidency since July 1st. Jansa was addressing a Free Iran World Summit organized by the Iranian opposition movement, the National Council of Resistance of Iran. Jansa told the conference that the “Iranian people deserve democracy, freedom and human rights and should be firmly supported by the international community.” The Slovenian Prime Minister also referred to Amnesty International’s demands to investigate the new Iranian President-elect Ebrahim Raisi over his alleged involvement in the executions. “For nearly 33 years, the world had forgotten about the victims of the massacre. This should change,” Jansa said. In a reaction, Borrell said that Jansa may hold the rotating EU Council presidency but he “does not represent” the EU in foreign policy. Jansa’s statements also sparked tensions with Iran.
In a joint statement released today, 10 human rights groups, including the Center for Human Rights in Iran, urged the international community to hold Iranian authorities accountable for their ongoing campaigns of persecution against Iranian dissidents based inside and outside the country, and called on Iranian authorities to release all individuals imprisoned for peaceful expression. Following is the statement and list of signatories. We, the undersigned human rights and civil society organizations, are deeply alarmed by the alleged attempt by Iranian state agents to kidnap Iranian-American dissident journalist and activist Masih Alinejad from U.S. soil.
The foiled kidnapping plot against activist and journalist Masih Alinejad, an Iranian-born U.S. citizen living in New York City, has sparked a wave of outrage. The Justice Department’s indictment and detailed court documents indicate the Islamic Republic’s significant investment in the plot. The most troublesome part of this case, however, has been the Biden administration’s weak public response, which invites more malign behavior from Tehran. Hundreds of dissidents have been threatened, kidnapped or assassinated since 1979, when the current regime rose to power in Iran.
If a loved one is being held hostage by an authoritarian regime, every phone call from overseas could be proof of life. That is the reality for the families of Americans Emad Shargi, Morad Tahbaz and Siamak and Baquer Namazi, who are being held in Iran as bargaining chips in broader talks with Washington about national security. So when Bahareh Shargi, Emad’s wife, didn’t get an expected call from Evin Prison recently, she was desperate to know why: Shargi hoped the nightmare of captivity would end before Iran’s June elections.
۱۰ سازمان حقوق بشری با اشاره به توطئه روبوده شدن مسیح علینژاد، مجری و مفسر برنامه تبلت بخش فارسی صدای آمریکا، بیانیهای خطاب به جامعه بین المللی صادر کردند و گفتند اگر جامعه بینالمللی عکس العمل نشان ندهد، این خطر تا حد زیادی وجود دارد که مخالفان ایرانی کماکان مورد هدف ماموران جمهوری اسلامی قرار بگیرند. امضا کنندگان این بیانیه که در میان آنها نهادهای همچون کمپین حقوق بشر در ایران، سازمان عدالت برای ایران، بنیاد عبدالرحمن برومند و سازمان عفو بینالملل به چشم میخورد روز دوشنبه ۲۸ تیر با انتشار این بیانه، برنامه ریزی نیروهای اطلاعاتی ایران برای ربودن مسیح علینژاد در خاک آمریکا را بسیار نگران کننده اعلام کردند.
اعتراض به بحران آب و مدیریت ناکارآمد آن در استان خوزستان دوشنبه شب، برای پنجمین شب متوالی ادامه یافت. گزارشهای رسیده از منابع محلی حکایت از آن دارد که شامگاه دوشنبه (۲۸تیرماه) مردم معترض شهرهای اهواز، خرمشهر، بستان، هویزه، سوسنگرد، دزفول، کرخه، شادگان، رامهرمز، ماهشهر، کوت عبدالله، شوش، حمیدیه، رامشیر، ویس و شهر جراحی به خیابانها آمدند وعلیه وضع موجود و مسئولان شعارهایی سر دادند. ویدیوهای منتشر شده در شبکههای اجتماعی نشان میدهد که نیروهای امنیتی در برخی شهرها با برخورد خشونتآمیز قصد داشتهاند تجمعات را برهم زنند و مردم را پراکنده کنند و در مواردی تیراندازی به سوی مردم گزارش شده است.