Twenty days before Iran’s presidential election, the Guardian Council, which vets the candidates, sent shock waves through the political elite and public by disqualifying two prominent figures: the former speaker of parliament, Ali Larijani, and the current vice president, Eshagh Jahangiri. These were just two of the many candidates who were barred from running. The disqualifications will likely boost the chances of an electoral victory for Ebrahim Raisi, a presidential candidate who heads Iran’s judiciary and who in 1988 served on a four-person committee that oversaw mass executions of thousands of political prisoners.
Iranian women’s poor political representation could be set to worsen under an ultraconservative poised to win next week’s presidential election. Ebrahim Raisi, who heads Iran’s judiciary, is the clear favourite from an all-male field of seven candidates to replace President Hassan Rouhani, a moderate elected on promises of social and cultural reform. Women’s rights campaigners in Iran have criticised Rouhani for breaking his promises to create a women’s ministry and appoint three female ministers — instead presiding over a decrease in women’s representation over his two terms in office.
A man serving a five-year jail sentence on political charges in Iran has died in custody, activists said, accusing the authorities of contributing to his death by neglecting his medical conditions. Sasan Niknafs had since July 2020 been serving a sentence on charges including disseminating “propaganda” against the state and Iran’s leadership, the New York-based Center for Human Rights in Iran (CHRI) and Oslo-based Iran Human Rights (IHR) said in separate statements late Monday. Both said that they held the head of the Iranian judiciary Ebrahim Raisi responsible for his death, the cause of which was not specified.
Manijeh Khorshidi can still hear the birds singing every morning. She can still smell the roses and jasmine. She can still taste the Persian tea, fresh bread and cheese her three siblings and parents would eat in the backyard of their Tehran, Iran, home every morning. They would pray together. Then, after they finished eating, the children would play for hours in the yard. “I can never remove those early morning breezes of Tehran in my mind,” Manijeh said. “The older I get, those memories become more vivid.” The Khorshidi family hasn’t been back to their home in Iran for more than 40 years. They probably won’t ever return.
As Iran prepares for presidential elections on June 18, citizens have spoken out about the torture and abuse they received at the hands of candidate Ebrahim Raisi, current head of the judiciary. He is accused of having been central to the 1988 massacre of Iranian political prisoners. It is alleged that he was a member of the so-called “Death Commission” in Evin and Gohardasht prisons. According to first-hand reports, Raisi was a prosecutor sentencing people to death.
A lawyer representing a pro-monarchy political prisoner, Sasan Niknafs, who died on Saturday at the notorious Greater Tehran Central Penitentiary says he has filed a lawsuit on behalf of the family of his client against the prison for “pre-meditated murder”. Speaking to Emtedad news website on Wednesday, Ali Sharifzadeh-Ardakani said after filing the lawsuit, he and the parents of the deceased had a meeting with Deputy Prosecutor of Tehran, Mohammad Shahriari, who ordered reviewing CCTV footage from the prison, prison infirmary records, and the forensic case file.
Another political prisoner has died in state custody two weeks before Iran’s Judiciary Chief Ebrahim Raisi, who is ultimately responsible for the care of prisoners, runs for president. “The reported death of Sassan Niknafs in the Greater Tehran Central Penitentiary reveals the mounting human toll of the Iranian judiciary’s policy of imprisoning individuals for criticizing the government,” said Hadi Ghaemi, executive director of the Center for Human Rights in Iran (CHRI). “These individuals shouldn’t be in prison in the first place yet they’re dying in state custody while Raisi focuses on his latest power grab,” he said.
Iranian authorities are blocking Jamshid Sharmahd, an Iranian-born German man who has been detained in Iran since July 2020, a lawyer of his choice. Instead, the Sharmahd family has been informed that they must pay $250,000 to a lawyer that has been approved by judicial authorities. “We are going by news headlines,” his daughter Gazelle Sharmahd, who is based in California, told the Center for Human Rights in Iran (CHRI). “And up until now, which is almost 10 months, our lawyer has not been able to see him or even get access to his case, not even once,” added Gazelle Sharmahd, adding that her family is seeking counsel in the U.S. by Jason Poblete of Global Liberty Alliance.
Iranian human rights monitoring groups have in recent days reported the transfer of two political prisoners in Greater Tehran Prison to wings reserved for violent criminals – a practice that human rights groups, including Amnesty International, have long argued violates both international and Iranian law. The judiciary said last year that the 2016 Political Offenses Act required the separate detention of the two categories of prisoner. In one case, Mohammad Torkamani was transferred June 1(link is external) within Greater Tehran Prison to a section housing violent offenders, the Human Rights Activists News Agency has reported.
The Observatory has been informed by the League for the Defence of Human Rights in Iran (LDDHI) about the sentencing and continued judicial harassment of Narges Mohammadi, journalist and Vice-President and Spokesperson of the Defenders of Human Rights Centre (DHRC). Ms. Mohammadi has campaigned for the abolition of the death penalty in Iran, and was awarded the Per Anger Prize by the Swedish government for her human rights work in 2011.
A bill on “cyberspace regulation” aimed at further restricting access, is to be tabled before the Iranian parliament, Reza Taghipour, former communications minister and a Tehran representative, said Sunday. Taghipour is an associate of Ebrahim Raeesi (Raisi) and heads the chief justice’s campaign committee on cyberspace for the controversial June 18 presidential election. Taghipour said a draft bill submitted to parliament in August 2020 by 40 lawmakers had attracted the signatures of 170 parliamentarians. Raeesi, widely seen as the election frontrunner promised in an interview with state television June 5 that he would, if elected, offer internet free of charge to all Iranians. But a presidential administration headed by a hardliner and a parliament dominated by conservatives does not bode well for internet freedom in Iran and the current bill signals further tightening.
Nasrallah dedicated most of the address to the 30-year anniversary of the Hezbollah-operated Al-Manar television station but also discussed tensions with Israel, the Lebanese domestic political and economic crisis, and rumors surrounding his health. “A massing of circumstances led us to this point: Economic crisis, poverty, unemployment and more,” he said, in remarks translated by Ynet. “Those who say Hezbollah is the reason for the crisis are ignoring the real reasons,” he claimed. Hezbollah has offered 20,000 volunteers “to support” Lebanon, said Nasrallah. He added that Iran has offered to send fuel to Lebanon that can be paid for using Lebanese currency, stating “if we indeed buy this, we’ll bring it in through Beirut port.”
Iran has amassed considerable soft power in Britain through a series of political and religious networks, a think tank report has found. The Henry Jackson Society said a number of UK-based charities, schools, and mosques have ties and shared objectives with figures in Iran. It said Iran sought to take advantage of sympathisers across the spectrum of British politics, including on the far left and far right.
On May 18, Behzad Mahmoudi, a Kurdish asylum seeker from Iran, set himself on fire in front of the United Nations office in Erbil, capital of the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) of Iraq. Four years ago, the 26-year-old fled his home city of Boukan in western Iran, hoping to find a better future away from the persecution and discrimination many Kurds in Iran say they face. But when Mahmoudi arrived in the KRG, he was unable to find a stable job or income. Desperate for a way out, he applied to the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) for temporary accommodation and asylum in a third country.
Iran’s confirmed Covid-19 cases surpassed the three million mark on Thursday, the health ministry said, while daily cases and deaths continued a downward trend ahead of a presidential poll. The Islamic republic, battling the Middle East’s deadliest coronavirus outbreak, is preparing to hold its presidential election on June 18. The country has been struggling since late March to contain its “fourth wave” of Covid-19 blamed on a surge in trips made during Persian New Year Holidays.
An Iran expert on Wednesday warned that none of the candidates in the country’s presidential election on June 18 offer a route out of its many crises. Nazila Fathi, an independent journalist and non-resident scholar at the Middle East Institute, was speaking at an event hosted by Chatham House titled “Iran’s presidential election: Domestic and international implications” and attended by Arab News.
In a hearing held Tuesday by the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee (SFRC) on the State Department budget, both the committee’s Democratic chairman, Sen. Robert Menendez (New Jersey), and its lead Republican, Sen. Jim Inhofe (Oklahoma), expressed strong dissatisfaction with the Biden administration’s efforts to revive the 2015 Iranian nuclear deal, formally known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA.) A common complaint about the JCPOA is that it addresses only one aspect of Iran’s malign behavior: its nuclear program, while ignoring other aspects of that behavior, like Iran’s support for regional proxies, as well as its support for terrorism and its missile program.
Secretary of State Antony Blinken said Tuesday that “hundreds” of US sanctions will remain on Iran even if the United States rejoins a nuclear accord. President Joe Biden’s administration has been engaged in indirect talks with Iran about reversing former president Donald Trump’s exit from the 2015 nuclear accord, formally known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA). “I would anticipate that, even in the event of a return to compliance with the JCPOA, hundreds of sanctions remain in place, including sanctions imposed by the Trump administration,” Blinken told a Senate hearing.
Iran came out of the recent war between Israel and Hamas thinking it had achieved something. It helped put the Palestinian “resistance” back on the map, its leadership and media think. Its analysis is that Israel’s defenses were challenged and even breached. This is why it has been highlighting new threats against Israel this week.
The ultra-conservative front runner in Iran’s presidential election is unfit to take power because of his enthusiastic leadership of the 1988 Iran prison massacres that killed about 5,000 regime opponents, former inmates said on Tuesday. Ebrahim Raisi, 60, the head of the judiciary and a former leading member of the so-called “death committees”, signed off on the executions of an inmate arrested at the age of 13 and another who was paralysed, former prisoners said.
President Joe Biden’s plan to provide 500 million doses of the Covid vaccine to countries suffering from a deadly pandemic is welcome news for many reasons. The most obvious is that it’s in everyone’s interest to inoculate as many people as possible in order to diminish the chances that the virus and its mutations will spread. It also happens to be true that donating vaccines is good public diplomacy.
The latest flare-up of violence between Israel and the Palestinians was extinguished on May 21 after eleven days of exchanging rockets and missiles, leaving behind a trail of casualties and destruction and further compounding what is an intractable dilemma that has demonstrated its resistance to resolution throughout decades. The conversation about the complexity of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict can go on infinitely, and there are always questions that remain unanswered. But the less-meditated aspect of this multi-pronged, byzantine feud is the role external powers have been playing since 1948 in lengthening and exacerbating what is no longer a fracas over territory, but a scene of wanton ideological politicking and muscle-flexing.
What’s the deal with President Joe Biden and Iran? This part-time president is a full-time appeaser of Tehran — and he is determined to give the terrorist regime the keys to a nuclear-armed empire. No other regime has connived at the deaths of so many American service members, as Iran did when it trained Iraqi militias and supplied them with improvised explosive devices — and as Iran still does, by supplying the increasingly accurate drones and missiles that have struck US bases in Iraq in the last six months. But Team Biden sees no evil.
اداره کل زندانهای استان تهران مرگ ساسان نیک نفس، زندانی سیاسی، در زندان بزرگ تهران، فشافویه را تایید کرده است. فعالان حقوق بشر روز دوشنبه (۱۷ خرداد) از مرگ آقای نیکنفس بعد از انتقال او به بهداری زندان تهران بزرگ (فشافویه) خبر دادند. آنها گفتند که آقای نیکنفس در اثر وخامت حال و عدم رسیدگی مقامات، جان خود را از دست داده است. ساسان نیکنفس بنا بر اتهاماتی نظیر “تبلیغ علیه نظام” و “توهین به بنیانگذار جمهوری اسلامی و رهبری” زندانی شده بود. علی شریفزاده اردکانی، وکیل ساسان نیکنفس، به بیبیسی فارسی گفت که خبر درگذشت او را در ابتدا هیچ مقام رسمی تأیید نکرده بود و “حتی به خانواده او خبری ندادهاند، اما منابعی از داخل زندان میگویند در بلندگوهای داخل زندان این خبر را اعلام کردهاند و به زندانیان تسلیت گفتهاند.
در پی انتشار خبر جان باختن ساسان نیکنفس، زندانی سیاسی در ایران، برخی از سازمانها و نهادهای حقوق بشری نسبت به بیتوجهی مقامهای قضایی به جان زندانیان در ایران واکنش نشان دادند. سازمان حقوق بشر ایران بیتوجهی مقامهای قضایی به جان و سلامت زندانیان سیاسی، فعالان مدنی، و مدافعان حقوق بشر در زندانهای ایران را عامدانه خواند و آنها را مسئول قتل این زندانیان دانست. محمود امیریمقدم، مدیر این نهاد حقوق بشری، با نام بردن از ابراهیم رئیسی و آیتالله علی خامنهای، آنها را مسئول بازداشت، آزار، و مرگ زندانیان سیاسی و عقیدتی دانست و گفت: «محرومیت زندانیان از حق درمان، مصداق شکنجه است. ما پیشتر بارها و به خصوص در پی درگذشت بهنام محجوبی از جامعه جهانی خواستهایم تا توجه جدیتری به مساله شکنجه و مرگ زندانیان در ایران نشان دهد. مقامهای جمهوری اسلامی باید در قبال مرگ ساسان نیک نفس پاسخگو شناخته شوند.
جناح اصلاحطلب نظام با بیش از ۱۰ داوطلب تلاش داشت بار دیگر با دوگانهی نخنمای «بد» و «بدتر» سهم خود را از سفره انقلاب حفظ کند اما به نظر میرسد رهبرشان دریافته که این ترفند دیگر پاسخ نمیده د. پس از یک دهه رشد اقتصادی منفی و وضعیت فلاکتبار معیشتی، نامزدهای نهایی که همگی در به وجود آمدن این شرایط نقش داشتهاند حالا هم هیچ برنامهای جز «شعار» و «وعده» ندارند
شاهزاده رضا پهلوی با اشاره به مرگ ساسان نیکنفس، زندانی سیاسی در ایران، تلاشهای «ایرانیان آزاده و آزادیخواه» را منعکسکننده «صدای خفه شده در گلوی مردم ایران» دانست و گفت که خواستار اعمال سیاست فشار حداکثری بر حکومت جمهوری اسلامی، و حمایت حداکثری از مردم ایران است
شاهزاده رضا پهلوی در گفتوگویی اختصاصی با کامبیز توانا از «بخش فارسی صدای آمریکا» که روز چهارشنبه ۱۹ خرداد در سنای آمریکا انجام شد همچنین با توجه به بحث تحریم انتخابات گفت حتی کسانی که زمانی بخشی از این نظام بودهاند، به این نتیجه رسیدهاند که باید انتخابات را تحریم کرد.