As Judiciary Chief Ebrahim Raisi run his campaign for the June 18 Presidential election, he still oversees the implementation of death sentences against prisoners. In this context, authorities hanged at least eleven prisoners, including two women, in the prisons of Qazvin, Birjand, Isfahan, and Yazd within one week alone, based on reports provided by the human rights association No to Prison – No to Execution. At dawn on May 30, authorities in Iran hanged a young couple in Qazvin Prison, west of Tehran. The man was identified as Yousef Pir-Ostovan. However, the female victim’s identification is unclear.
Ali Akbar Mohtashamipour, a Shiite cleric who as Iran’s ambassador to Syria helped found the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah and lost his right hand to a book bombing reportedly carried out by Israel, died Monday of the coronavirus. He was 74. A close ally of Iran’s late Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, Mohtashamipour in the 1970s formed alliances with Muslim militant groups across the Mideast. After the Islamic Revolution, he helped found the paramilitary Revolutionary Guard in Iran and as ambassador to Syria brought the force into the region to help form Hezbollah.
Lawyers for a Kinahan-linked gangster serving a life sentence in the Netherlands for a political dissident’s murder have called for an investigation into the possible involvement of Iran in the hit. Naoufal Fassih (36) a Dutch national of Moroccan origin, is currenty in jail for organising the murder of an Iranian dissident in the Netherlands. Fassih was arrested during a raid on a Kinahan-linked safe-house on Baggot St, Dublin, in 2016 and extradited to Holland where he was jailed for various offences.
The United States is grappling with a rapidly evolving threat from Iranian proxies in Iraq after militia forces specialized in operating more sophisticated weaponry, including armed drones, have hit some of the most sensitive American targets in attacks that evaded U.S. defenses. At least three times in the past two months, those militias have used small, explosive-laden drones that divebomb and crash into their targets in late-night attacks on Iraqi bases — including those used by the C.I.A. and U.S. Special Operations units, according to American officials.
Iranian presidential candidate Ebrahim Raisi should be investigated for crimes against humanity, the Center for Human Rights in Iran (CHRI) said in a statement today. “Raisi is a pillar of a system that jails, tortures, and kills people for daring to criticize state policies,” said CHRI Executive Director Hadi Ghaemi. “Instead of running for president, he should be tried in an impartial court and held accountable for his role in the extrajudicial executions of thousands of prisoners,” Ghaemi added.
Iran has sought to interfere in Britain’s political system through online disinformation and fake websites, according to a report to be published on Monday. The 100-page report, published by the Henry Jackson Society, cited examples of fake sites being used to foment Scottish independence and promote anti-Saudi, anti-Israeli, and pro-Palestinian themes in the UK. It warned that Iran, once considered a “third-tier” country in terms of its cyber capabilities, has become increasingly sophisticated in both the scope and choice of its targets.
DW: Last October you were released from prison after serving a five and a half year-term. Now you have been sentenced again to 30 months in prison and 80 lashes for “propaganda against the political system, slander and rebellion against the prison administration.” Narges Mohammadi: I was convicted because I reported prison director Gholamresa Siaei to the authorities. In January 2020 – while I was still imprisoned in the women’s section of Tehran’s Evin Prison – he personally took me out of my cell and brutally beat me.
I was only 17 in the autumn of 1981 when I was arrested in Tehran for supporting and selling the publication of the People’s Mujahedin of Iran (MEK), a political organisation opposed to the Islamic Republic of Iran. I spent almost 11 years in Ayatollah Khomeini’s prisons in Evin, Ghezel Hesar and Gohardasht until I was finally released in the spring of 1992. During my time in prison I faced torture and mock executions. I was kept in solitary confinement for five years. But my most daunting experience was witnessing the infamous 1988 massacre.
Following the leak of Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif’s audiotape in April, no one doubts about the role of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) in Tehran’s foreign policy. “In the Islamic Republic, the military field rules,” Zarif said. “The [military] field’s success was more important than diplomacy’s success… I have sacrificed diplomacy for the field rather than the field serving diplomacy.” In this respect, Zarif particularly pointed to the role of former IRGC Quds Force commander Qassem Soleimani. He also grumbled over Soleimani sabotaging the nuclear negotiations with the West.
Candidates in Iran’s presidential election this month traded strong barbs in a debate on Saturday, accusing each other of treason or of lacking the education to run an economy devastated by three years of U.S. sanctions. While the five hardline candidates attacked the eight-year performance of outgoing pragmatist President Hassan Rouhani, the leading moderate candidate, former central bank chief Abdolnaser Hemmati, blamed hardliners for heightened tensions with the West that he said had worsened Iran’s economic woes.
The seven candidates endorsed by the Islamic Republic to run in the June 18 controversial presidential election failed to impress the voters in Saturday’s televised debate, partly due to their own weaknesses and partly because of restrictions imposed by Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and the state TV operating under his direct supervision. Most of those who have watched the three-hour long program and spoke out were shocked by the candidates’ shrewdness in exposing each other’s weaknesses and the accusations and counteraccusations traded during the debate.
Two weeks before the controversial June 18 presidential election in Iran, the country’s reformist parties do not have their own candidate. Nor has any one of the reformist parties and political organizations put its weight behind the two non-hardliner candidates among the seven hopefuls endorsed by constitutional watchdog, the Guardian Council. On Wednesday, the left-wing proreform clerical organization, the Militant Clerics Association headed by former reformist President Mohammad Khatami, supported the view of the reformist umbrella organization not to back any candidate. It also condemned the non-elected Guardian Council’s measure of not endorsing the qualifications of any one of the reformist candidates named by the organization.
The May 2021 report by Iran Human Rights Monitor into the situation of human rights abuses in Iran is now out and, as always, it makes for disturbing and horrific reading, specifically relating to executions, suppression, and arrests. We’re going to look at the report here, but we recommend looking at the full thing. Some 21 people were executed in Iran during May, including 15 on drug charges and two on rape charges, which are not death penalty crimes under global law. Of course, it’s not surprising when you consider that Iran is the biggest executioner in the world in terms of its population.
Canada, Sweden, Ukraine, and the United Kingdom have delivered a notice of claim against Iran over its downing of Ukraine International Airlines Flight 752, the four countries said Thursday. Foreign ministers from those countries, who lost citizens and residents when the jetliner was shot down shortly after taking off from Tehran in January 2020, said in a statement that Iran’s “actions and omissions amount to breaches of international law.”
An Iranian retired teacher Nahid Fathalian has contracted the coronavirus at the women’s ward of the notorious Evin Prison. Retired teacher Nahid Fathalian tested positive for the virus at the women ward of Tehran’s Evin prison. Nahid Fathalian needs to receive proper treatment, while her stay in prison would threaten the health of other prisoners. Evin Prison authorities have not tested other prisoners and have not separated Fathalian from other inmates putting them at risk of contracting the virus.
No information is available on the health conditions of Arzhang Davoudi, 68, who has been detained in the high security ward of Rajaishahr Prison (Gohardasht) in Karaj, isolated from other inmates since May 27, 2021. Political prisoner Arzhang Davoudi was transferred to Rajaishahr Prison after long years of exile in remote prisons in Ahvaz, Bandar Abbas, and Zabol. Prisons authorities and Intelligence Ministry agents held him incommunicado and subjected him to torture and harassment in a bid to break him.
Satellite photographs taken Thursday show the burned hulk that remains of Iran’s biggest warship after it caught fire and sank in the Gulf of Oman. The photos from Planet Labs Inc., analyzed by The Associated Press, show the 207-meter (679-foot) Kharg just off the coast of the Iranian port city of Jask, surrounded by a sea of oil-slicked waters. Iranian officials have not acknowledged the pollution left behind by the ship’s sinking on Wednesday. The photos show the ship partially submerged, with debris floating in the water around it.
In two weeks, when Iran is scheduled to hold its presidential election, Narges Mohammadi will be staying home. One of her country’s most courageous human-rights activists, she views the upcoming vote as a sham. “The principle of absolute jurisprudence has invalidated all the principles of the Iranian constitution and reduced the power of other institutions to zero,” she told me in an WhatsApp interview from Iran. The country’s unelected supreme leader and the country’s Guardian Council, which vets presidential candidates and can overturn laws passed by Iran’s legislature, have consolidated power.
In Vienna, the American negotiating team is busy snatching defeat from the jaws of victory as the Islamic Republic demands concession after concession from Washington in exchange for Tehran’s return to the 2015 nuclear deal. In a stark shift from just a few months ago, when the Islamic Republic was under extraordinary economic pressure, the regime is once again confident on the international stage. Indeed, it appears that the Biden administration, which promised to center its foreign policy on human rights, is potentially saving one of the world’s most brutal dictatorships from collapse and building it back better.
The annual threat assessment released in April by the US Office of the Director of National Intelligence states that “Iran will remain a regional menace with broader malign influence activities.” The Islamic Republic is expected to continue those malign activities all over the globe, but its focus will likely remain its immediate regional surroundings—particularly Iraq. Tehran views Iraq as a key country over which it must establish and maintain complete supremacy.
In the early hours of June 2, the venerable Iranian supply ship Kharg caught fire and sank in the Gulf of Oman near the Strait of Hormuz, following more than twenty hours of failed rescue operations. The loss is a major setback for the Islamic Republic, exposing not only the poor readiness of the Iranian armed forces, but also the lethality of Iran’s military equipment to its own soldiers. The cause of the fire was not immediately known and it may not be revealed to the public. It could have been an accident or another act of sabotage carried out by Israeli intelligence agency Mossad. Israel has been blamed for numerous mysterious fires across Iran in recent years, as well as the assassinations of half a dozen Iranian scientists, including Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, the reputed head of Iran’s mothballed nuclear weapons program, who was gunned down outside of Tehran in November 2020. There have also been prior incidents of sabotage at sea. For example, Israel was blamed when the Saviz spy ship was damaged by an explosion in the Red Sea in April 2021.
مجموعه ناظران میگویند، بیانگر نظر نویسندگان آن است. بی بی سی میکوشد تا با انتشار مطالبی از طیفهای گوناگون، چشمانداز متنوع و متوازنی از دیدگاهها ارائه دهد. شطرنجبازی با گوریل یا گاوبازی؟ اولی توصیف علیرضا علویتبار است از “رویایی اصلاحطلبان و نظام”؛ دومی را شکرالله پاکنژاد به کار برد، یک سال پس از انقلاب ۵۷ و به عنوان راهکاری در تقابل با نظام. اوایل دهه هشتاد، وقتی گرهها و بنبستهای اصلاحطلبی دیگر قابل انکار نبود، علیرضا علویتبار استراتژیست اصلاحطلب تمثیلی برای توضیح وضعیت به کار برد که گرفت و تا مدتی از احادیث مشهور اصلاحطلبان بود: “سیاستورزی اصلاحطلبانه شبیه بازی شطرنج با گوریل است.”
همزمان با اعتصاب کارگران هفتتپه، اسماعیل بخشی، فعال کارگری، با اشاره به حمله افرادی با چاقو و چماق به فعالان کارگری، هشدار داد که جان فعالان کارگری هفتتپه در خطر است. اسماعیل بخشی روز یکشنبه، ۱۶ خردادماه، با انتشار رشته توییتی در حساب کاربری توییتر خود، از حمله اراذل اجیرشده» با سلاح سرد به فعالان کارگری هفتتپه و ضربوشتم آنها خبر داد. او ازجمله، به یکی از کارگران به نام منصور رش اشاره کرده که با چاقو مورد حمله قرار گرفته و بهدلیل خونریزی در بیمارستان بستری شده است
سه سازمان «کنگره ملیتهای ایران فدرال»، «شورای دموکراسیخواهان ایران»، و «همبستگی برای آزادی و برابری در ایران» روز یکشنبه ۱۶ خرداد به کنفرانس مجازی دو روزه خود پایان دادند. این کنفرانس با صدور بیانیهای و با تاکید بر ادامه کارزار «نه به جمهوری اسلامی»، «تحریم انتخابات» و همچنین تلاش برای اتحاد بیشتر میان گروههای مخالف حکومت ایران، پایان یافت. در بیانیه پایانی کنفرانس این سه گروه، محورهایی چون «نه به نمایش انتخابات»، «آری به سرنگونی جمهوری اسلامی» و «پیش به سوی جمهوری فدرال ایران» مورد تاکید قرار گرفت. خالد حسنپور، عضو رهبری حزب دموکرات کردستان و مسئول ارتباط با سازمانهای سیاسی اپوزیسیون در گفتوگو با بخش فارسی صدای آمریکا اعلام کرد تاکید بر فدرالیسم، از جمله مواردی است که در آینده و در کارهای این ائتلاف دنبال خواهد شد.