Holakou Rahmanian, born into a Bahai family in Tehran in 1989, grew up like any Iranian child, shone at school and passed his exams with flying colours. But then he applied to go to university. “I received a message saying ‘your file is incomplete’,” he told AFP. After making enquiries, “I realised it had nothing to do with having an incomplete file, but everything to do with being a Bahai,” he said in a telephone interview. “I was very frustrated.” The true reason for his being barred was passed on verbally but not in any official document.
Expatriate Iranian dissidents as well as some activists inside Iran in a session on the Clubhouse social-media application Friday entitled “No To the Islamic Republic” urged Iranians to boycott the June 18 presidential elections. The session was broadcast live by Iran International TV and other Persian-language media outside Iran. Exiled Prince Reza Pahlavi, who said in March he no longer wants to be shah, told the session that a boycott would send a message to Iran’s “regime” and the “international community” that Iranians do not support the Islamic Republic, which considers a high turnout a form of democratic endorsement.
It is probably a bad sign when one of the few memorable moments in a presidential debate is an admission that the ballot is rigged. The candidates in Iran’s spent much of the televised event, held on June 8th, criticising an incumbent who is not even on the ballot. Perhaps they felt there was little to discuss: most are hand-picked conservatives put there to lose. It fell to Mohsen Mehralizadeh, a former provincial governor of little note, to point out the obvious. The regime, he said, had aligned “sun, moon and the heavens to make one particular person the president”.
Iran’s regime on Saturday intensified its persecution of the family of the murdered champion wrestler, Navid Afkari, whose family members faced brutal beatings and arrests in the city of Shiraz for their protest against the reported wrongful imprisonment of Navid’s brothers, Vahid and Habib. Navid’s brother, Saeed, tweeted “Two female officers beat my mother so that her head was hit on the asphalt. 20 people beat Navid, 5 people [beat] Elham and 2 people [beat] my mother, who is a 55-year-old woman. You give meaning to the word filth, you cowards.”
Esmail Gerami, a 67 year-old pensioner and labor activist was sentenced to prison and lashes for participating in protests held by pensioners for higher wages in Tehran. The Haft Tappeh Sugar Cane Mill Labor Syndicate reported on Wednesday that Esmail Gerami, one of the leaders in the nationwide pensioners protests, had been fined two million tomans in addition to imprisonment and flogging. Labor activist Esmail Gerami was arrested on March 7 outside the Ministry of Labor in Tehran during peaceful nationwide pensioners’ protests and was released the next day.
The lawyer of Sasan Niknafs, an Iranian political prisoner who recently died in prison, said on Wednesday that he had filed a “deliberate murder” complaint at the request of his client’s parents. “This morning, together with the request of Sasan’s parents, we filed a complaint with the District 27 Criminal Court under the heading of deliberate murder to find out how my client died,” Ali Sharifzadeh told the state-run Emtedad news site. Sasan Niknafs had been serving a five-year sentence at the Greater Tehran Penitentiary since July 2020 on charges including disseminating “propaganda” against the state and Iran’s leadership.
Political prisoner Shakila Monfared was beaten and injured on Monday, June 7, by a number of prisoners after she was unlawfully kept in a ward that holds inmates convicted of dangerous crimes in Qarchak Prson. Prisoners incited by prison staff attacked and insulted Shakila Monfared, injuring her with the lid of a tuna can. According to Iranian law, prisons are required to divide prisoners according to the nature of their convictions.
The current persecution of the Baha’i community in Yemen at the hands of the Iranian-backed Houthi militias evokes frightening memories off what the Baha’i community off Iran faced immediately after the Islamic Revolution of 1979. Various human rights groups confirm that the Houthi rebels are increasingly targeting the followers of the Baha’i faith in Yemen, and in the areas they control are prosecuting the Baha’is for purely religious reasons. To better understand what’s happening, this reporter interviewed Yemenis from the Baha’i community to ask them about the Houthi persecution.
Family and friends of two European dual citizens scheduled to face an Iranian court this weekend urged G7 leaders to demand that Tehran frees all of its illegally-detained foreigners. Nahid Taghavi, 66, a German dual citizen, and Briton Mehran Raoof, 64, are due in court for a closed-door trial on Sunday after their arrest eight months ago in a purge of labour and human rights activists in Tehran. Mr Raoof, who appeared in court in April with Ms Taghavi and three others, faces a sentence of 10 years in jail if convicted of being the leader of an outlawed communist cell.
US Special Envoy for Iran, Robert Malley, has expressed sadness for the death of an Iranian political prisoner in a Tehran prison that occured on June 5 and has asked for respect for human rights and freedom of expression. In a tweet on Friday, Malley, who is heading the US delegation in the Vienna nuclear talks with Iran wrote, “Saddened by the news that Sassan Niknafs died in Greater Tehran Prison. The 36-yr old father of two was imprisoned unjustly for expressing his opinions…Human rights must be respected.”
Another presidential election is unfolding in Iran. Many observers expect a low turnout as many ordinary Iranians are either discouraged or disillusioned. However, those in power seem not to mind. The political elite of the Islamic Republic of Iran had once considered elections a source of the regime’s legitimacy. According to them, Iranians who voted in the past polls approved the system and wanted to participate. However, it all changed when Iranians increasingly voted for the candidates not endorsed by the hard-liners.
Iran’s theocratic regime is paving the way for a hardliner, who is linked to mass executions and human rights abuses, to become the country’s next president — as dissidents cry foul over what they see as a rigged election, and are calling for mass boycotts. Ebrahim Raisi, Iran’s judiciary chief who lost the 2017 contest against now-outgoing President Hassan Rouhani, is seen as the favorite to win the June 19 vote. Raisi was one of a number of officials sanctioned by the U.S. government in 2019 over human rights abuses.
… For the exiled opposition, his name is indelibly associated with the mass executions of Marxists and other leftists in 1988, when he was deputy prosecutor of the Revolutionary Court in Tehran, although he has denied any involvement. Raisi has decades of judicial experience, serving as prosecutor-general of Tehran from 1989 to 1994, deputy chief of the Judicial Authority for a decade from 2004, and then national prosecutor-general in 2014. In 2016, supreme leader Ali Khamenei put Raisi in charge of the powerful Astan Qods Razavi charitable foundation, which manages the Imam Reza shrine in Mashhad and controls a colossal industrial and property asset portfolio.
A week before Iran’s presidential poll, the spokesman of the electoral commission Esmail Musavi has accused Canada of acting against international norms by not allowing voting to take place on its territory for people of Iranian origin, Fars news agency close to the Revolutionary Guard reported on Friday. But there are no clear international rules(link is external) or a universally accepted practice for countries to allow others to hold elections on their territory. It mostly depends on relations between two counties if the host nation would agree to have its territory host elections for another state.
For Iranian rock musician Pooyan Ghandi, the roar of the crowd and the thrill of live performance are things he can only dream about. The 34-year-old lives in the religious city of Mashhad where concerts have been banned for more than a decade after hardliners in the theocratic state argued that they were against Islamic teachings. While such restrictions are rare elsewhere in Iran and in Tehran it is possible to see live music, Ghandi and musicians like him in Iran’s holiest city spend their days composing music that they are unlikely ever to play to a crowd.
The US special envoy for Iran on Sunday condemned Tehran’s continued jailing of human rights lawyer Nasrin Sotoudeh, saying “she should not have spent a single day in prison”. Robert Malley tweeted a message of solidarity on the third anniversary of Ms Sotoudeh’s imprisonment. “It’s been three yrs since human rights lawyer Nasrin Sotoudeh was sentenced to 38.5 yrs in prison and 148 lashes for defending women’s rights in Iran. From prison she [continues] to advocate for the humane treatment of political prisoners. She should not have spent a single day in prison,” he wrote.
‘Those who live in Albania’…, this is an expression which has becoming a habitual phrase by the Iranian regime’s official media about the members of the Iranian opposition the Mojahedin-e Khalq (MEK/PMOI) who are now living in Albania. By this way, the Iranian regime is complaining about the MEK’s influence in Iran, especially among the youth by the social media and the internet, fearing the guidance of the youth by them.
The list of challenges facing Iran’s next president would confound the most capable of leaders. Iran is in negotiations with the United States over how to revive the 2015 nuclear deal, and in talks with regional nemesis Saudi Arabia. The country is in the throes of an economic crisis and is under mounting pressure to reform. And there are growing questions about succession plans for the 82-year-old Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Amid these tides of change, Iran’s political elite has decided that the next face of the Islamic Republic should be a figure steeped in its conservative roots and directly linked to some of the darkest chapters of its history.
Thursday’s edition of the hardliner Javan newspaper affiliated with the revolutionary Guard carried two articles responding to President Hassan Rouhani’s criticism of presidential election candidates for their attacks on his administration’s performance. At a cabinet meeting in Tehran on Wednesday, Rouhani sarcastically charged that the five hardliner candidates chosen by the Guardian Council were “Martians” who did not know much about the state of the affairs in Iran. The candidates, all of them part and parcel of the regime during the past four decades blamed the Rouhani administration for the country’s problems mindless of the impact of US sanctions and the coronavirus pandemic on the administration’s ability to tackle serious problems.
در دوره بیعت (انتخابات)، توجهها به نامزدهای نظام، دستگاه تبلیغاتی، هزینههای تبلیغات، روش تبلیغاتی نامزدها، رقابتهای میان آنها، میزان مشارکت در بیعت و روشهای تقلب و مهندسی و دستکاری معطوف میشود و موضوعهایی که در صدر اخبار قرار میگیرند اینها است که حکومت چگونه میخواهد فرد موردنظر «آقا» یا همان «نظام» (بهعلاوه سپاه پاسداران) را از صندوقها در بیاورد و شورای نگهبان و دستگاههای امنیتی و نظامی صحنه را چگونه میچینند. اما این داستان طرف دیگری هم دارد: مخالفان رژیم در این شرایط چه میکنند؟ چشماندازها، چالشها و فرصتهای آنان چیست؟ آیا تحریم اعلام میشود یا خیر؟ اگر بشود، گستردگی آن تا چه حد است؟ آیا موفقیتی حاصل میشود؟ و اصولا آن گونهای که بیعت برگزار میشود، چه تاثیری در عملکرد، راهبردها و تاکتیکهای مخالفان دارد؟
جمعی از کنشگران مدنی و سیاسی داخل و خارج از ایران، ضمن حمایت از تحریم انتخابات ۱۴۰۰ خواستار تغییر اساسی در قانون اساسی شدهاند. در همین حال، میرحسین موسوی، از رهبران جنبش سبز ایران، میگوید در کنار مردم علیه انتخاباتهای مهندسی شده میایستد. در آستانه انتخابات ۱۴۰۰، شماری از کنشگران مدنی و سیاسی داخل و خارج از ایران، از جمله فائزه هاشمی، مهدی نوربخش، یاسر میردامادی، با انتشار بیانیهای ضمن اعلام تحریم انتخابات ریاست جمهوری ایران، بر اهمیت تغییر اساسی در «ساختار قدرت» و تغییر «قانون اساسی» برای دستیابی به «تحول بنیادی» تاکید کردند. امضا کنندگان این بیانیه، هشدار دادهاند که وضعیت کنونی از «مهندسی انتخابات» فراتر رفته و جامعه شاهد بازگشت حکومت «مطلقه» به وضعیت دهه ۶۰ و انتخابات «تکقطبی» آن دوران است.
اسماعیل گرامی، از بازنشستگان معترض به وضعیت معیشتی در ایران که از اواسط فروردین ماه سال جاری در بازداشت به سر میبرد، توسط دادگاه انقلاب به تحمل پنج سال زندان، ۷۴ ضربه شلاق، و جریمه نقدی محکوم شد. به گزارش برخی از رسانههای حقوق بشری، این کارگر بازنشسته در ایران که از ۱۴ فرودین ماه سال جاری بازداشت و در زندان تهران بزرگ به سر میبرد، طی روزهای گذشته از سوی شعبه ۲۶ دادگاه انقلاب تهران به پنج سال زندان، ۷۴ ضربه شلاق و دو میلیون تومان جریمه نقدی محکوم شده است. اتحادیه آزاد کارگران ایران که میگوید، «اسماعیل گرامی یکی از هزاران کارگر بازنشستهای است که در اعتراض به وضعیت بد معیشتی، با خواسته افزایش حقوق و دیگر مطالبات معیشتی و درمانی» در تجمعات حضور داشته است، ضمن محکوم کردن حکم صادره، خواهان پایان دادن به تعقیب قضایی و آزادی فوری بی قید و شرط این کارگر زندانی شد.
گروهی از مخالفان جمهوری اسلامی یک کنفرانس مجازی با عنوان “نه به جمهوری اسلامی؛ رای بی رای” برگزار کردند. این افراد که از طیفهای متفاوت و گستردهای از مخالفان حکومت ایران هستند، از نقاط مختلف جهان از جمله داخل ایران در این کنفرانس شرکت کردند.