Ron Klain, President Biden’s chief of staff, said the U.S. has not reached an agreement with Iran to secure the release of four American hostages held in the country, refuting a report from Iranian state media that said a deal had been struck. “Unfortunately, that report is untrue. There is no agreement to release these four Americans,” Klain said Sunday on “Face the Nation.” “We’re working very hard to get them released. We raise this with Iran and our interlocutors all the time. But so far, there’s no agreement to bring these four Americans home.” The Associated Press reported Sunday morning that Iranian state television said the country had reached a deal to release Western prisoners in exchange for other prisoners and billions of dollars from the U.S. and the United Kingdom. The Iranian report cited an anonymous official who said the U.S. and U.K. would release four Iranians and $7 billion in frozen Iranian funds.
Amid efforts to revive the tattered 2015 Iran nuclear agreement, relatives of Europeans held in Iran say their governments are kowtowing to Tehran. In recent interviews, relatives of five dual nationals and one French citizen described the efforts of European governments to end their loved ones’ detention as ineffective. Most said they felt officials had been too soft on Iran and implored them to take more assertive action to secure their relatives’ release.
Members of Iran’s minority Baha’i religious sect are being forced by Iranian authorities to bury their dead in mass graves originally used for political prisoners in 1988. The instruction was issued last week, according to the BBC, who said they had identified at least ten new graves dug at one known site. Iran’s Baha’i are a persecuted minority. Numbering just 350,000, they face systematic abuse and repression as the Shia state considers their religion heretical.
U.S., U.K., and Iranian officials have all dismissed or otherwise downplayed unconfirmed reports out of Iran that suggested deals had been struck to swap prisoners against the backdrop of high-profile nuclear talks over Iran’s nuclear activities. The United States said reports of an agreement to exchange prisoners and free up billions in Iranian assets were “not true,” while British officials avoided linking a U.K. national’s case to current talks, and an Iranian envoy said a U.S. exchange was “not confirmed.”
Iran is “toying with the life” of dissident filmmaker Mohammad Nourizad who is seriously ill in prison after torture which allegedly included multiple injections of an unknown substance into his genitals, Amnesty International charged on Friday. Nourizad, who has written and directed several films, has been serving since August 2019 a prison sentence totalling over 17 years on charges of insulting supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, according to Amnesty.
A German-Iranian national held in Iran faces a “security charge”, her daughter said as a court held a first hearing in the case on Wednesday. Nahid Taghavi, 66, was arrested at her Tehran apartment on October 16 after years fighting for human rights in Iran, in particular for women’s rights and freedom of expression, according to the rights group IGFM. “Today was the first hearing of #NahidTaghavi Another trial day is scheduled, date unknown,” her daughter Mariam Claren wrote on Twitter.
U.K. Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab suggested Iran is holding the dual British-Iranian national Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe hostage. Zaghari-Ratcliffe last week was handed a new one-year jail term for “propaganda against the state,” after completing a five-year sentence for sedition and espionage in Tehran in March. Zaghari-Ratcliffe, who has always denied the charges against her, is appealing, according to her lawyer, Hojjat Kermani.
In a BBC interview, Mr Raab said Tehran was using her in “a cat-and-mouse game” for diplomatic leverage, after she was sentenced to prison again. He also said he believed she was being held illegally under international law. The 42-year-old British-Iranian mother has been held in Iran since 2016. Following the foreign secretary’s interview, an anonymous official cited on Iranian state TV suggested the UK had paid a £400m debt to free her – but the Foreign Office insisted its position was unchanged.
Female human rights activists imprisoned in Iran face increased jail terms and transfers to prisons with “dangerous and alarming” conditions, hundreds of miles away from their families, according to campaigners. Warnings of the deteriorating treatment of female prisoners in Iran come days after Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, the British-Iranian national who has served a five-year prison sentence in Iran, was sentenced to a further year in jail and a year-long travel ban by the Iranian courts.
The Islamic Republic of Iran has announced that it may execute Vahid Afkari, the brother of the champion wrestler Navid Akari, who was the victim of an extrajudicial killing by Iran’s judiciary for his protest against Iranian regime corruption. The founder of the campaign United for Navid, Masih Alinejad, on Saturday tweeted: “After executing the innocent athlete Navid Afkari for protesting, authorities of the Islamic Republic of Iran have now threatened to execute his jailed brother, Vahid Afkari, if he doesn’t agree to make forced confessions. His life is in danger.#United4Navid.”
Two Iranian Bahais were detained in their homes in Shiraz southwestern Iran yesterday. According to the Human Rights News Agency, they were identified as Vahid Dana and Saeed Abedi. Intelligence agents searched their homes and confiscated some of their personal belongings including their cellphones, computers, holy books and Bahai photos. The two Bahai men are being kept in the Shiraz Intelligence Office Detention Center. Vahid and Saeed were previously detained in August 2018, tried in absentia, and sentenced to one year of prison and one year of exile.
Authoritarian rulers have clamped down on dissidents trying to organize online in recent years, with some attempting to emulate the firewall that insulates China’s homegrown web from the world outside. Iran has taken a different approach. Knowing its filters aren’t enough to keep Iranians off global social-media platforms, it floods them with propaganda, aiming to turn them to its advantage. The latest is Clubhouse. Activists complain that Iranian authorities are co-opting the app to create a facade of democracy ahead of presidential elections in June to boost voter turnout, which the state has often used as a badge of legitimacy.
The state security forces opened fire and used teargas Wednesday against locals who were protesting the cutting down of their walnut trees by government agents in Sarab Kahman village, in western Lorestan Province. The Special Forces opened fire on villagers with live bullets and pellet guns, injuring and wounding many of the locals including women. Special Forces attacked the homes and gardens of the villagers. The number of injured locals is still unknown.
An Iranian appeals court has upheld the prison and flogging sentences against Azerbaijani Turkic activists, Meysam Jolani and Ali Khairjou. The pair, charged with “participation in disrupting public order”, were sentenced to eight months in prison and 40 lashes last December. Their upheld sentence is suspended for a year. They were arrested at their homes in October 2020, with unidentified security agents raiding the place and beating them, for participating in a rally in Ardabil’s Jiral Park.
Iran was given a four-year ban by the International Judo Federation (IJF) for “repeated and very severe breaches” of the organisation’s statutes after it pressured one of its fighters not to face an Israeli athlete. Judo’s world governing body imposed the ban on Thursday after the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) last month lifted a previous indefinite suspension and ordered a disciplinary review. The IJF had previously sanctioned Iran in October for putting pressure on fighter Saeid Mollaei to withdraw from the world championships to avoid a potential final round against Israeli contender Sagi Muki.
A group representing victims’ families of an airliner shot down by Iran’s military in January 2020 have announced Sunday that the military prosecutor in Tehran has issued a writ banning prosecution of high-ranking officials for the incident. An association representing the families of victims announced on social media that some families have received an electronic message a few days ago from the military prosecutor handling the case informing them that high-ranking officials cannot be prosecuted.
The United States has reiterated its concern about Iran’s poor human rights record in its first official comment on the Islamic republic’s election last week to the United Nations’ top legislative body on women’s rights. But it fell short of the explicit denunciation of the outcome that many rights advocates had hoped for. The remarks, which were provided to VOA on Thursday and largely repeated later at a State Department briefing, mark the United States’ stand on the election of Iran to the U.N.’s Commission on the Status of Women.
Members of the Iranian opposition commissioned a billboard in Midtown Manhattan, opposite the offices of The New York Times last Friday, calling on Americans to ignore the media warning Americans not to trust their media which serve as apologists for the Iranian regime and endorse a return to the nuclear agreement with Iran, a.k.a. Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA). The billboard states that the Iranian regime has “killed more than 1,500 innocents on the ground and lied about it,” referring to the Iranian protestors who were murdered by their government during demonstrations in November 2019.
Even Iran has its bipartisan moments in American political circles. Democrats and Republicans alike now largely agree that the 2015 nuclear deal, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, needs to be renegotiated and its provisions strengthened. Members of both parties believe that any prospective agreement must address Tehran’s ballistic missiles and its suspect regional activities. Yet often missing is any serious consideration of Iran’s human-rights record. The most consequential victims of the theocratic regime are its own citizens, and their plight shouldn’t be ignored. Human rights have played an important role in U.S. diplomacy. During the Cold War, American officials routinely brought up the Soviet Union’s repressive policies with their Russian counterparts.
The economy of Iran, the leading state sponsor of terrorism, now stands on the brink of collapse. The United States should not bail it out. Recent data from the International Monetary Fund reveals that Iran carried over $122 billion in accessible reserves in 2018, the year that President Trump withdrew from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action. Today, the Islamic Republic is down to a paltry $4 billion in usable foreign exchange reserves. Further combined with a currency that has lost half of its value, the failed government response to the coronavirus, and millions of Iranians taking to the streets to protest the legitimacy with the regime, the leaders in Tehran are now vulnerable and desperate.
The anger expressed last week by the Labour MP Tulip Siddiq over the government’s failure to secure the release from Iran of her wrongly accused constituent Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe is fully justified. This distressing case has dragged on for too long. Again and again since Zaghari-Ratcliffe’s arrest in 2016, ministers have hinted at progress, only for hopes to be dashed. Now she has been condemned to a further year in jail. This is outrageous. Yet what does the government do? Nothing that makes a difference.
When Iran was elected by the UN Economic and Social Council to its Commission on the Status of Women, concerns were raised about the kind of message the international organization was sending to the world. Since the commission’s job is the global promotion of equality and women’s empowerment, the minimum requirement for membership should be respect for women and their right to make their own decisions. As a woman who was born and raised in the Middle East and has spent most of her adult life fighting for women’s rights in this troubled region, I was insulted and flabbergasted by this outrageous move, given Iran’s poor record in that area and many others.
On May 1st, International Workers’ Day, workers, and retirees held protest rallies in more than 20 cities in Iran, including Tehran, Karaj, Arak, Mashhad, Khorramabad, Marivan, Kermanshah, Haft Tappeh, Tabriz, Sanandaj, Rasht, Boroujerd, Qazvin, Sari, Ilam, … to commemorate International Workers’ Day and to pursue their rights. Workers are celebrating International Workers’ Day in a situation where, according to government statistics, which is far from the truth, six million people partially and 1.5 million permanently lost their jobs during the coronavirus crisis up to October 2020. And between the fall of 2019 and the fall of 2020, more than one million women were fired from the labor market.
دامنیک راب، وزیر امور خارجه بریتانیا، میگوید رفتار ایران با نازنین زاغری، شهروند ایرانی-بریتانیایی “مصداق شکنجه است. آقای راب به بیبیسی گفت که از نظر او نگه داشتن و زندانی کردن خانم زاغری خلاف قوانین بینالمللی است و در پاسخ به این سوال که آیا او در ایران “گروگان” گرفته شده، گفت “خیلی سخت است که بتوان چیزی بر خلاف این توصیف گفت. نازنین زاغری که به تازگی دوره پنج ساله زندان به اتهام جاسوسی را در ایران به پایان رسانده، در پروندهای دیگر به یک سال حبس و یک سال ممنوعیت خروج از ایران محکوم شده است. به گفته وکیل خانم زاغری اتهام او در این پرونده “فعالیت تبلیغی علیه نظام” عنوان شده است.
سازمان عفو بینالملل در گزارشی نسبت به اقدامات تخریبی در گورستان خاوران و بیاحترامی به دفن بهاییان اعتراض کرد و از جمهوری اسلامی ایران خواست این کار را متوقف کند. دیانا الطحاوی، معاون رئیس مرکز خاورمیانه و شمال آفریقای عفو بینالملل، در این گزارش که روز پنجشنبه نهم اردیبهشت منتشر شده است، گفت: «این تازهترین اقدام از مجموعه تلاشهای مجرمانه مقامات ایران در سالهای گذشته برای از بین بردن محل دفن قربانیان کشتارهای سال ۱۳۶۷ در تلاش برای خلاص شدن از اسناد و مدارک مهم جنایت علیه بشریت، انکار حقیقت، عدالت، و دادخواهی برای خانواده کسانی که به زور ناپدید شده و خودسرانه در خفا اعدام شدهاند، است.
شبکه تلویزیونی انبیسی نیوز آمریکا روز جمعه ۱۰ اردیبهشت ماه با انتشار گزارشی درباره خانوادههای زندانیان دو تابعیتی که در حال حاضر در ایران زندانی هستند، به نقل از این خانوادهها نوشته است که دولتهای اروپایی در مقابل جمهوری اسلامی ایران سر خم کردهاند. بنا بر این گزارش، شری ایزدی، همسر انوشه آشوری که در حال حاضر در ایران زندانی است، به تازگی در یک مصاحبه تلفنی از لندن گفت: «من نمیدانم چرا به ایران فشاری وارد نمیکنند؟ نمیدانم چرا رفتار آنها به جای این که تقابلی باشد، بیشتر در پی راضی کردن است؟ چرا که چنین رفتاری جواب نداده است. خانم ایزدی افزود: «چرا آن را گروگانگیری نمینامند؟