News from Iran

Please read below WFAFI’s searing assessment of the UN Human Rights Council Council’s High Commissioner for Human Rights, Louise Arbour’s recent trip to Iran as well of other horrendous news about what is happening to women in Iran:

Women’s Forum Against Fundamentalism in Iran E-Zan Newsletter September 15, 2007

To our readers, In the past eight months, there has been 235 prisoners hanged, according to Iran’s state-run news sources and agencies. Men and women have been publicly hanged in major cities and the number is growing daily. No criticism or condemnation, as of yet, from UN Human Rights Council. Instead, the Council’s High Commissioner for Human Rights, Louise Arbour traveled to Iran to attend a Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) conference on human rights and cultural diversity. Given the backing from NAM of developing nations, there is now a plan to set up a human rights and cultural diversity centre in Iran. And Arbour is ready to provide “technical and consultation assistance ” for this center.

One can only wonder how Louise Arbour, neglected to acknowledge the atrocities taken place in Iran. While families of victims and political prisoners desperately tried to meet with her during her trip, she enjoyed an orchestrated visit with fundamentalist leaders in Tehran.The day after Arbour left Iran, Ahmadinejad’s regime hanged 21 people. On September 5, the Amnesty International said that it is “appalled at the reports of the execution of 21 people.” With Ahmadinejad, it is hard to ignore the daily public hangings in Iran these days.

Ironically, her trip also coincided with the one year anniversary of women’s campaign to gather “One Million Signatures” on gender discrimination in the Islamic Republic of Iran. Some of the organizers of this campaign are still in prison. Of course, they never got a visit from Louise Arbour, nor did the families of victims and political prisoners.

With the state-sponsored escalated violence against women, public hangings, arbitrary arrests and crackdowns, Arbour’s visit was adding salt to injury for Iranian people, particularly women!

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Radio Netherlands Worldwide – August 16, 2007 Editor-in-chief of Shahrzad News Mina Saadadi has just announced that the authorities in Iran have been blocking her news agency’s website since last week. The Hilversum-based editorial staff say the Iranian government’s move follows a report on the website about the death sentence handed down to a 25-year-old man. Most of Shahrzad News’ readers use Iran’s two major Internet service providers but this route has now been cut off. Their screens are blank, showing only the message “denied”. This is the first time the authorities have directly blocked Shahrzad News. However, three journalists were arrested at Tehran airport at the beginning of this year on the way to a course organised by Shahrzad News. The website, which is partly financed by the Dutch foreign ministry, has been online since 2006. It provides news about Iran in Farsi and English. The women journalists at home in Iran and abroad receive training at Radio Netherlands Training Centre.

WFAFI News – August 16, 2007 Iranian parliament refined the polygamy laws to remove the condition for men to notify their wife should they decide to take on a second or third wife. The current regulation now allows men to take more than one wife so long as the can present financial papers to court and prove that they can afford have more wives.

Agence France Presse – August 20, 2007 A mother of one of the three Iranian students still held in jail after an incident in May on Monday publicly accused the authorities of torturing the young men to obtain confessions. Azam Tajik, mother of Ehsan Mansouri, a student detained for the past four months on suspicion of publishing material offensive to Islam in university newspapers, said her son had been held in solitary confinement in Tehran’s Evin prison. “Our children were forced to confess in prison under torture,” she told a news conference on freedom of speech held by Nobel laureate Shirin Ebadi. “When they left solitary confinement they rejected the statements they had given.” The Iranian judiciary has vehemently denied that any accused are tortured in its prisons although it has said the Tehran judiciary is preparing a report about the families’ claims. Mansouri was arrested in May with Majid Tavakoli and Ahmad Ghassaban over the appearance of “anti- Islamic” material and caricatures in reformist student newspapers at Tehran’s prestigious Amir Kabir University. “Our children denied and condemned it, but everyone from the university to security officials said they have committed an offence,” Tajik said. “Who has proven their guilt? In front of which lawyer? Under torture and in solitary confinement?” the distraught mother said. “They beat up my son when they took him from home to jail, his nose was bleeding all along, they told us we were lying and that we should stop giving interviews,” Tajik said. The students said the material been planted in a plot to discredit them. Amir Kabir has long been a hotbed of student radicalism and President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was last year the target of heckling in a stormy address to the university.

The Associated Press – August 21, 2007 A detained Iranian-American academic accused of conspiring against the government will be freed from prison within hours if bail is posted in her case, a top judiciary official said Tuesday. Haleh Esfandiari, director of the Middle East program at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, has been jailed largely incommunicado at Tehran’s Evin prison since early May on charges of acting against national security.Bail was set at 3 billion rials or about $333,000, Mohammad Shadabi, an official at the Tehran prosecutor’s office, told The Associated Press. “I can’t say for now that she will be allowed to leave the country or not,” Shadabi added. [Esfandiari was released on August 22 and left Iran a week later.

Radio Free Europe - August 27, 2007 A lawyer for Radio Farda broadcaster Parnaz Azima, who has been trapped in Iran since January, says Azima is now facing a charge of acting against Iran's national security by working for the U.S.-funded broadcaster. Azima was already facing charges of working with Radio Farda and spreading propaganda against the Iranian state. Azima and her lawyer, Mohammad Hossein Agassi, have rejected the charges as baseless. Agassi told Radio Farda that authorities have given Azima no indication of when she might be allowed to leave. "Officials who decide about the case -- apart from judiciary officials -- have emphasized that she should stay in Iran for now. The reason they mention is her special situation in international relations -- in fact, that means ties between Iran and the U.S.," Agassi said. Azima traveled to Tehran in January to visit her sick mother. On her arrival, authorities confiscated her Iranian passport. Since then, Azima has been unable to leave Iran and return to her work in Prague. In an August 27 telephone interview with Radio Farda, Azima described her situation as "unbearable." "This uncertain situation is very difficult to deal with. I left all my life abroad to come and visit my ailing mother, and now I feel my personal life is falling apart," Azima said. "My grandchild will be born soon in the U.S., and I wish I could be there to experience it. I was under medical treatment before coming to Iran, and that has now been interrupted." Azima said that authorities had urged her to resign from Radio Farda, but she told them that her work was her own decision.

Reuters News Agency - August 27, 2007 Nobel Peace Prize laureate Shirin Ebadi said she had asked the United Nations to investigate the status of women in Iran and accused Iranian authorities of detaining activists demanding more women's rights. Ebadi, speaking at a press conference on Monday marking the first anniversary of a campaign to gather 1 million signatures in favour of women's rights in the Islamic state, said she had contacted top U.N. human rights official Louise Arbour. She said about 50 activists had been detained over the last 14 months for involvement in women's rights protests and some of them faced charges of acting against national security. She did not say how many -- if any -- were still being held. Western diplomats and rights groups say Iran is taking a tougher line against dissent in general, possibly in response to increased international pressure over its disputed nuclear activities, which the West suspects is aimed at making bombs. The Islamic Republic rejects allegations it discriminates against women, saying it follows sharia law. Tehran usually reacts dismissively toward criticism from any foreign organisations, including the United Nations. "I have written a letter to the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights and complained for the first time, and said this is the situation of women rights in Iran and these are our demands," Ebadi said. "Please send a special rapporteur to Iran to report on women, to investigate the conditions for women," she said, describing her message to Arbour.

Radio Free Europe - September 3, 2007 UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Louise Arbour is in Iran to attend a meeting of the Nonaligned Movement on human rights and cultural diversity. During her stay in Iran, Arbour is reportedly scheduled to meet with women's rights advocates and human- rights defenders at the UN office in Tehran, Radio Farda reported.

Women eNews - September 4, 2007 Two bills regarding the Islamic veil pending in the Italian parliament are a symbol of the country's increasing focus on the assimilation of immigrants. Stories of fundamentalism are spurring public debate over the condition of Muslim women. While it is still not clear which of the competing bills might be approved into law, in Catholic Italy, where a woman in a veil is as likely to be a nun in a habit as a Muslim under a chador, tensions over the veil are bringing into public debate larger concerns over integration and assimilation among the nation's 900,000 Muslim immigrants. "It is not so much a matter of veil or not veil," Sholeh, of Democratic Iranian Women in Italy, told Women's eNews. "The fundamentalist frame of mind is far more dangerous than the veil itself." Sholeh thinks every woman should be able to make a conscious decision free from people who tell her what to think and say. "See what is happening in Iran," says Sholeh, referring to the thousands of women arrested there for infringing the strict dress code imposed by religious leaders. "Even after 28 years, there are women who still do not accept."

NCR Website - September 5, 2007 The mullahs' henchmen hanged seventeen prisoners identified as Masoumeh Aramideh, Rahandel Shiri, Gholam-Hossein Saljoqi, Hossein Gholami, Seyed Hossein Hosseini, Reza Dawoodi, Mohsen Afshar- Barji, Hassan-Reza Saiidi, Esmail Khoshkerdar, Sharaf-aldin Golmajdi, Mahmoud Hafezi-Far, Mohammad Saraii, Javad Khayat-Azad (a.k.a Khayatzadeh), Reza Jafari-Zadeh, Ali Naderian, and Mohammad Saiid Zabi-allah-Habibi on the charges of being "corrupt on earth," in the northeastern city of Mashhad, the state-run television reported today. The regime hanged another four prisoners identified as Mohammad Ali Qasemi, Alireza Bar-Ahoii, Gaz-Ava Mahmoudzehi, and Abdulrasoul Qorbanzadeh in the southern city of Shiraz. Deputy Judicial Ministry in the southern Fars province, Abdulnabi Najibi said, "The [executions] will guarantee a long lasting public security.” The total number of executions in the past eight months has more than doubled the same period last year according to the state-run media. In the same period a number of political prisoners have been executed as common criminals.

Agence France Presse – August 20, 2007 Iran is pressing on with one of its toughest moral crackdowns in years, warning tens of thousands of women over slack dress, targeting “immoral” cafes and seizing illegal satellite receivers, local media reported on Monday. The Iranian police launched the crackdown in April in a self-declared drive to “elevate security in society” that encompassed arrests of thugs, raids on underground parties and street checks of improperly dressed individuals. Reza Zarei, commander of police in Tehran province, said that since the drive began police in his region have handed out 113,454 warnings to women found to have infringed Iran’s strict Islamic dress rules. “Of these 1,600 cases have been given to the judiciary” for further investigation, he said. He added that 5,700 people — including 1,400 men — have been sent to “guidance classes” on how to behave in society.