Posts Tagged ‘Iran’

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FIDH MEMBERS IN DETENTION OR HARASSED FOR THEIR HUMAN RIGHTS WORK

November 21, 2012

In various parts of the world human rights defenders brave legal harassment, arbitrary detention, ill treatment, torture and sometimes death, in seeking to secure freedom and dignity for all. In challenging serious abuses of State power, many such defenders find themselves behind bars;
Les défenseurs des ligues membres de la FIDH emprisonnés
FIDH works endlessly to secure the release of these (and other) human rights defenders, mainly through the Observatory for the Protection of Human Rights Defenders – its joint programme with OMCT.A recent summing up by FIDH of their (local affiliate) in Bahrain, Belarus, Iran, Turkey and Uzbekistan makes sobering reading:
Check out the steps that led to their detention:

  • In BAHRAIN :Nabeel Rajab, FIDH Deputy Secretary General and President of the Bahrain Center for Human Rights (BCHR)

    Abdulhadi AlKhawaja, former President of BCHR

The Bahrain Centre or Human Rights is one the 2012 nominees of the Martin Ennals Award.

  • In BELARUS :Ales Bialiatski, President of the Viasna Human Rights Centre and FIDH Vice President

Since his election in 1994, Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko, has installed an authoritarian regime that represses freedom of expression, assembly and association. The human rights situation in Belarus markedly deteriorated on 19 December 2010 when riot police brutally dispersed demonstrators protesting against the unfair handling of the presidential election. This event marked the beginning of an unprecedented wave of repression, which continues to this day. Prominent human rights defender, Ales Bialiatski was arrested in Minsk on 4 August 2011 and sentenced to four-and-a-half years in prison on trumped up tax evasion charges. He remains in prison to this day.

  • In IRAN :Mohammad Ali Dadkhah, founding member of Defenders of Human Rights Centre (DHRC) and human rights lawyer

    Abdolfattah Soltani, founding member of DHRC and human rights lawyer

    Mohammad Seifzadeh, member of the DHRC and human rights lawyer

    Nasrin Sotoudeh, member of DHRC and prominent human rights lawyer known for defending juveniles facing death penalty, prisoners of conscience, human rights activists and child victims of abuse; she is lso a 2012 MEA nominee

  • In TURKEY :Muharrem Erbey, IHD Vice Chairperson and former Chairperson of Diyarbakır branch
    Arslan Özdemir, Executive, IHD Diyarbakır branch
    Şerif Süren, Executive, IHD Aydın branch
    Orhan Çiçek, Executive, IHD Aydın branch
    Reşit Teymur, Executive, IHD Siirt branch
    Abdulkadir Çurğatay, Executive, IHD Mardin branch
    Veysi Parıltı, Executive, IHD Mardin branch
    Şaziye Önder, representative IHD Doğubeyazıt (Ağrı)
    Mensur Işık, former Chairperson, IHD Muş branch
    Hikmet Tapancı, Executive, IHD Malatya branch
    Ali Tanrıverdi, Chairperson IHD Mersin branch
    Osman İşçi, IHD General Headquarters (Ankara) former worker and member of IHD
    Hanim Koçygit, Executive, IHD Sakarya branch
    Bekir Gürbüz, former Chairperson, IHD Adıyaman branch

FIDH notes in this respect: Despite Turkey’s considerable human rights progress since 2000, those expressing ideas on “sensitive” human rights related issues continue to be targeted and criminalised by the public authorities. So-called “sensitive” questions include the promotion of alternative identities to the Turkish mainstream (e.g. asserting the rights of ethnic and religious minorities, especially Kurds, as well as the rights of sexual minorities). It also encompasses any criticism of the State and its institutions, including institutional functioning, judicial independence, and impunity for human rights violations. Members of NGOs, lawyers, trade unionists, journalists, intellectuals, academics, conscientious objectors, the families of victims of serious human rights violations, and others have been targeted by State policies that consider their expression of their views to be a threat. Fourteen members of the Human Rights Association (IHD), a Turkish FIDH member organisation, are currently being held in preventive detention under an anti-terrorism law that criminalises legitimate expression of opinion.

  • In UZBEKISTAN :Zafar Rakhimov, member of the Human Rights Society of Uzbekistan (HRSU) Kashkadarya regional branch
    Nasim Isakov, member of the HRSU Djizak regional branch
    Yuldosh Rasulov, member of the HRSU Kashkadarya regional branch
    Azam Formonov, Head of the Sirdarya regional branch of the HRSU
    Gaybullo Jalilov, member of the HRSU Karshi regional branch

Uzbekistan has the highest number of human rights defenders serving lengthy prison sentences in Eastern Europe/Central Asia. These sentences are usually served in penal colonies where the regime is extremely strict. Harsh conditions and ill treatment have caused the health of incarcerated defenders to deteriorate quickly. These inhumane and degrading conditions are currently the reality of several members of FIDH member organisation, the Human Rights Society of Uzbekistan.

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Sotoudeh finally allowed brief visit by family

November 16, 2012

According to Iranian blogger Arseh Sevom writing today the young children of detained lawyer Nasrin Sotoudeh, nominee of the 2012 MEA, were finally allowed to visit their mother in prison on Monday 12 November with security forces present. Referring to her mother’s health conditions as a result of the continuous hunger strike, Mehraveh said: “She has lost weight and is taken to the infirmary on occasion.”

Sotoudeh’s husband Reza Khandan wrote [in farsi]: “Today, right after he stepped out of the jail’s gate, Nima [their son] took away the kiss from his cheek and put it on mine saying that mom said keep this kiss and give it to daddy when you see him”. Two days before the visit, Khandan and his two children waited for three and a half hours to visit their wife and mother, but were denied access

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Fars News Agency: Javad Larijani Blasts Double-Standard Policies on Human Rights in Iran

November 1, 2012

 

Official Blasts West’s Double-Standard Policies on Human Rights in Iran

TEHRAN (FNA)- Secretary of Iran’s Human Rights Council Mohammad Javad Larijani rapped the West’s double-standard policies and stances on human rights issues, saying that western states shelter terrorist groups like the anti-Iran terrorist Mojahedin-e Khalq Organization (MKO) and award them in the name of defending human rights.

“Our people are familiar with the West’s discriminatory and hostile attitude towards the Islamic Republic of Iran,” Larijani said in a meeting with Head of Iran-Germany Parliamentary Friendship Group Bijan Jirsarayee in Tehran on Wednesday. 

Larijani rapped the double-standard polices and behavior of the western states towards the human rights issues in Iran. 

On one hand, the western states shelter and support terrorist groups like the MKO … and cooperate with the US in imposing unilateral sanctions against Iran which have inflicted great losses on the Iranian people and is a blatant violation of human rights, and on the other hand, they suddenly emerge as advocates of human rights and grant awards to culprits in Iran as if they are defenders of human rights, he added. 

The European Parliament announced that this year’s winners of the Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought are two Iranian culprits (!ed), lawyer Nasrin Sotoudeh and film director Jafar Panahi. Sotoudeh is now imprisoned in Iran for security crimes and Panahi is a fugitive living outside Iran.“

The rest of the article is one long rambling statement against the MKO and the support it gets from the West (read for yourself if you want to) but with the marvelously inconsistent quotation of …Human Rights Watch, one of the NGO regularly denounced as a stooge of the same West..

“A May 2005 Human Rights Watch report accused the MKO of running prison camps in Iraq and committing human rights violations. According to the Human Rights Watch report, the outlawed group puts defectors under torture and jail terms.”

Fars News Agency :: Official Blasts Wests Double-Standard Policies on Human Rights in Iran.

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2012 Sacharov award to Iranian HRDs

October 26, 2012

Nasrin Sotoudeh and Jafar Panahi – winners of ...

Nasrin Sotoudeh and Jafar Panahi (Photo credit: European Parliament)

Two Iranian activists, lawyer Nasrin Sotoudeh and film director Jafar Panahi, are this year’s joint winners of the European Parliament Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought. They were chosen by President Schulz and political group leaders on Friday morning.

“The award of the Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought to the Iranians Nasrin Sotoudeh and Jafar Panahi is a message of solidarity and recognition to a woman and a man who have not been bowed by fear and intimidation and who have decided to put the fate of their country before their own. I sincerely hope they will be able to come in person to Strasbourg to the European Parliament to collect their prize in December”, said President Schulz, announcing the winner after the meeting. He underlined that the unanimity this year was exceptional.

Nasrin Sotoudeh

Nasrin Sotoudeh, born in 1963, is an Iranian lawyer and human rights advocate. She has represented opposition activists imprisoned following Iran’s disputed June 2009 presidential elections, juveniles facing the death penalty, women and prisoners of conscience. She was arrested in September 2010 on charges of spreading propaganda and conspiring to harm state security and has been held in solitary confinement. She was one the 3 nominees of the Martin Ennals Award 2012. Sotoudeh has two children. She recently started a hunger strike in protest against the state’s harassment of her family.

Jafar Panahi

Jafar Panahi, born in 1960, is an Iranian film director, screenwriter and film editor. He first achieved international recognition with his film The White Balloon that won the Caméra d’Or at the 1995 Cannes Film Festival. His films often focus on the hardships faced by children, the impoverished and women in Iran. Mr Panahi was arrested in March 2010 and later sentenced to six years in jail and a 20-year ban on directing any movies or leaving the country. His latest film “This Is Not a Film” was smuggled from Iran to the 2011 Cannes Film Festival on a USB stick hidden inside a cake.

(The two other finalists were Ales Bialiatski and Pussy Riot)

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There Are Absolutely No Political Executions in Iran ………..

October 23, 2012

In this excellent blog post, R0ya Boroumand shows the statement by Sadeq Larijani – Head of the Judiciary and Iran official spokesperson on human rights – to be nonsense. Even more she reflects how the death of her own father (stabbed to death in Paris in 1991) has motivated her to continue documenting human rights violations in Iran. And she draws the conclusion that it must have helped:

“Perhaps Larijani’s denial of political executions is not meant for the Iranian people or the human rights community, but rather for a poorly informed and supportive constituency outside Iran that is too willing to accept the Islamic Republic’s habit of blaming others for its shortcomings. But we should appreciate Larijani’s unease, even if it is expressed in the form of a blatant lie. The fact that the number of reported executions in Iran has been trending downward — from 817 in 2010 and 652 in 2011 to 385 so far in 2012 — may well have to do with the active presence and reporting of the UN special rapporteurs and others who are focused on safeguarding human rights.

Through my work toward documenting the stories of all the Islamic Republic’s victims, I have found the best answers I can to the questions that obsessed in 1991. I have also found some relief from the consuming anguish and frustration that decades of untold stories and anonymous suffering by thousands of victims and victims’ loved ones have brought in their train.

The painstaking task of documenting thousands of executions to which my colleagues and I have devoted our lives for the past ten years, added to the efforts of other human rights organizations, has helped to protect people who dare to speak up. Perhaps, and in spite of the limited means at our disposal, we have made the regime worry that if it kills them they will not be forgotten, and so stayed the executioner’s hand. Larijani’s absurd claim that “there are absolutely no political executions in Iran” did not make me smile, but it did reinforce my conviction that truth telling is the most effective tool we have to make tyrants uneasy and slower to unleash their violence.”

Roya Boroumand: There Are Absolutely No Political Executions in Iran — A Statement by the Head of Irans Judiciary That Should Not Go Unnoticed.

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Punitive measures imposed on detained human rights defender Nasrin Sotoudeh

October 21, 2012
Paris-Geneva, October 19, 2012. The Observatory for the Protection of Human Rights Defenders, a joint programme of the International Federation for Human Rights (FIDH) and the World Organisation Against Torture (OMCT), strongly condemns the harassment faced by Ms. Nasrin Sotoudeh and, more generally, denounces the policy of subjecting jailed human rights defenders to punitive measures in prison.
Since her arbitrary arrest and detention in September 2010, Ms. Nasrin Sotoudeh, a human rights lawyer known for defending juveniles facing death penalty, prisoners of conscience, human rights activists and children victims of abuse and a member of the Defenders of Human Rights Centre (DHRC), who is serving a six-year imprisonment sentence in Evin prison, has been subjected to increasingly restrictive and clearly discriminative and arbitrary conditions of detention.Mrs Sotoudeh was recently honored as the MEA 2012 nominee (see http://www.martinennalsaward.org for a short film on her work).
In recent weeks, Ms. Sotoudeh’s visiting day has been changed from Sunday to Wednesday without any legitimate ground being provided by the prison authorities. In addition to being deprived of face-to-face family visits, the new measure, which contravenes the prison’s rules, has made it more and more difficult for her to receive visits from her family over the past three months. It is also to be recalled that Ms. Sotoudeh has been banned from making phone calls since May 2011.
The Observatory recalls that punitive measures against Ms. Sotoudeh are not new. Previously, Ms. Sotoudeh had been held for long periods in solitary confinement and denied contact with her family and lawyer. She also reportedly suffered acts of torture in prison in order to force her to confess. On July 11, the authorities banned her husband and her 12-year-old daughter from travelling abroad. This case has now been referred to the Islamic Revolution Court (Branch 28), which has summoned them to appear.
To protest against these measures which violate her right to receive unhindered visits by her family, Ms. Sotoudeh started an unlimited hunger strike on October 17, raising further concerns for her physical integrity. It should be recalled that she had already come close to death in 2010 after three dry hunger strikes to protest her conditions of detention and violations of due process during her trial.
“The conditions of detention imposed on Nasrin Sotoudeh are unacceptable and clearly aim at imposing additional punishment on her for her human rights activities”, declared Souhayr Belhassen, FIDH President.
“The punitive measures against Ms. Sotoudeh while in detention once more illustrate the relentless policy of the Iranian authorities to stifle human rights defenders, which should be strongly condemned by the whole international community”, added Gerald Staberock, OMCT Secretary General.
The Observatory firmly denounces the policy of harassment against Ms. Nasrin Sotoudeh, through arbitrary detention, judicial harassment and punitive measures in prison, which only aims at sanctioning her legitimate human rights activities. It also urges the Iranian authorities to immediately and unconditionally release her as well all other imprisoned human rights defenders, and more generally to conform to the United Nations Declaration on Human Rights Defenders, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and international human rights instruments ratified by Iran.
For further information, please contact:
• FIDH: Arthur Manet / Audrey Couprie: + 33 1 43 55 25 18
• OMCT: Delphine Reculeau : + 41 22 809 49 39

 

 

Punitive measures imposed on detained human rights defender must cease : humanrights-ir.org.

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Amir, author of Zahras Paradise, talks about his album on YouTube

October 11, 2012

This dates back to March 2012. I missed it and so may have you. It is a excellent interview by Iran specialist Drewery Dyke of of AI with the author Amir. He is an Iranian-American human rights activist, journalist and documentary filmmaker.

Set in the aftermath of Iran’s fraudulent elections of 2009, Zahra’s Paradise is the fictional story of the search for Mehdi, a young protestor who has disappeared in the Islamic Republic’s gulags. Mehdi has vanished in an extrajudicial twilight zone where habeas corpus is suspended. What stops his memory from being obliterated is not the law. It is the grit and guts of a mother who refuses to surrender her son to fate and the tenacity of a brother—a blogger—who fuses culture and technology to explore and explode absence: the void in which Mehdi has vanished.

In conversation with Amir, author of Zahras Paradise – YouTube.

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Abdolfattah Soltani awarded IBA Human Rights Award Lawyers for Lawyers

October 10, 2012

Iranian lawyer and human rights defender Abdolfattah Soltani recevied on 5 October the 2012International Bar AssociationHuman Rights Award. The announcement came during the International Bar Association (IBA) Annual Conference taking place in Dublin, Ireland.

Mr Soltani, who co-founded the Defenders of Human Rights Centre (DHRC) with Nobel Peace Prize winner Ms Shirin Ebadi, has worked courageously and determinedly throughout his career to provide pro bono legal counsel to those in need.

As a result of his human rights defence work, Mr Soltani has endured persistent persecution from the Iranian government and has been imprisoned on several occasions. He is currently serving a 13-year prison sentence in Iran that stems from a number of charges including co-founding the DHRC, spreading anti-government propaganda and endangering national security. The imprisonment began on 4 March 2012.

Among Mr Soltani’s high profile cases are:

  • Nasrin Soutoudeh, a journalist and human rights lawyer; 2012 nominee of the MEA
  • Akbar Ghanji a human rights activist, who exposed the involvement of several government officials in the murder of intellectuals and journalists in the 1990s; MEA Laureate of 2006 and
  • Zahra Kazemi, a Canadian-Iranian journalist arrested for taking photographs in front of Evin prison in July 2003. Ms Kazemi died in the same prison several days later.

In addition, Mr Soltani has defended teachers, protesters, other fellow human rights lawyers, political activists, students, and several Baha’I (Iranian minority group) leaders. In many instances other lawyers refused to take on these cases because of the risks involved.

 

 

Iran Abdolfattah Soltani awarded with IBA Human Rights Award Lawyers for Lawyers.

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Ceremony of the Martin Ennals Award to follow on the internet (2 October, 18h00)

September 27, 2012

Every day all over the world, unsung heroes are risking their lives to call attention to injustice and to fight for human rights. On Tuesday October 2nd, one of them will honored with the Martin Ennals Award. The Martin Ennals Award  is chosen by a Jury of ten leading Human Rights organizations including: Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, Human Rights First and others (see www.martinennalsaward.org). Thus, this prize represents the expression of the whole Human Rights movement.

The winner will be selected from three nominees, who personalize wider issues in their home countries and allow these issues to be represented through individual cases:

  1. Venerable Sovath Luon: sometimes referred to as the “Multimedia Monk”. He challenges the widespread eviction of poor people from land they have long held but without title, often due to the destruction of records during the Khmer Rouge period.
  2. Nasrin Sotoudeh, an Iranian Lawyer serving a 6 year prison sentence in Iran for “… the offences of “acting against the national security”, “propaganda against the regime” and “membership of Human Rights Defenders Centre” – an organisation presided over by the Nobel peace laureate Shirin Ebadi.
  3. Bahrain Center for Human Rights: Currently high on the world media agenda. Two of the main founders: Abdulhadi al-Khawaja and Nabeel Rajab are serving jail sentences. Zainab al-Khawaja was arrested for demonstrating against the government, while other members are regularly arrested and abused.

The ceremony is hosted by the City of Geneva in Victoria Hall. Short films commissioned by the Martin Ennals Foundation. Those who cannot attend in person may want to follow it on the internet (www.martinennalsaward.org) starting at 18h00 Geneva time.

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Posters MEA ceremony up in Geneva

September 18, 2012

courtesy Nat Daudrich

Thanks to the partnership with the City of Geneva hundreds of posters are lining the streets of Geneva in anticipation of the ceremony of the Martin Ennals Award for Human Rights Defenders (MEA) on 2 October in the splendid Victoria Hall. The laureate will be announced that evening but all three nominees will be honored and films on their work shown. The nominees are: Luon Sovath (Cambodia), Nasrin Sotoudeh (Iran) and the Bahrain Centre for Human Rights.

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