Monthly Report: June 2007

The circumstances of the U.S.-Iranian dual citizens imprisoned or detained in Iran continued to deteriorate this past month. On May 11, Iranian-American sociologist Kian Tajbakhsh was arrested by the Ministry of Intelligence and is being held without charges in Evin prison. Shirin Ebadi announced her condemnation of the detentions on May 17, as well as her commitment to legally defend Haleh Esfandiari, the Director of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholar’s Middle East Program currently under arrest. Ebadi stated, however, that the Revolutionary Court has denied her request to represent Esfandiari and has not informed the defendant of the charges, which she claims violates Iranian law. On May 18, 16 female United States Senators drafted a letter to United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki Moon calling on him to intervene in Iran to help secure the release of Esfandiari and Radio Fardah broadcast journalist Parnaz Azima. The same day, Iran told the United States that it was treating the detainees as though they were Iranian citizens only, and that the U.S. should not intervene. On May 29, Esfandiari, Azima, and Tajbakhsh were charged with espionage and threatening national security. On June 6, Judge Hossein Haddad stated that Esfandiari and Tajbakhsh had confessed to some of the charges made against them. The same day, Azima, who was released on bail on May 15, appealed to the U.S. State Department to put pressure on Iran regarding her case, which she fears may take years to resolve otherwise. As of June 10, she had been denied her latest request to have her passport returned to her.

 

Additionally, Iranian-American Ali Shakeri is believed to have been detained in Iran since early May, when he was scheduled to return to California after a trip to see his mother. While the Iranian government has refused to confirm his detention, the newspaper Kayhan declared him to be a CIA operative and a revolutionary agent.

Human Rights Watch stated that these arrests constitute an “Iranian government campaign to deter local civil society activists,” and called for the immediate release of the Iranian-Americans, while on May 22, the United States House of Representatives passed Resolution 430, demanding the immediate release of Esfandiari and the other detainees, stating that “the United States should coordinate its response with its allies throughout the Middle East, other governments, and all appropriate international organizations.” On May 31, a joint statement was issued by Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, the International Federation for Human Rights, and Reporters Without Borders, calling on Iran to “end harassment of dual-nationals” and to immediately release those detained.

Iranian human rights lawyer Abdolfattah Soltani was released from prison in late May after being acquitted of espionage charges. Soltani is an associate of Shirin Ebadi, working with her as part of Haleh Esfandiari’s legal defense.

 

Reporters Without Borders condemned Iran’s treatment of journalist Ali Farahbakhsh, who is apparently very ill and has been denied proper treatment inside Evin prison, where he has been held since November after returning from a conference in Bangkok, Thailand. On March 26, he was sentenced to three years in prison on espionage charges. 

Iran arrested three Finnish nationals fishing in the Persian Gulf for entering Iranian waters. The Finns, who work in Dubai, were arrested on June 2 near Abu Musa Island, controlled by Iran but disputed by the United Arab Emirates. They were released on June 7 after Iran accepted that their entry into its waters was accidental.

 

A general crackdown, including stricter dress code enforcement, which began in April, continued this month, as part of a broad plan to tighten restrictions and improve domestic security. A women’s football game scheduled to be held in Berlin, the first international game for a women’s Iran team since 1979, was cancelled. The Supreme National Security Council, led by Ali Larijani, has issued a set of guidelines for news organizations, prohibiting reporting on the dress code restrictions, sanctions, and other domestic tensions. As for the dress code restrictions, since the beginning of the crackdown, over 150,000 people have been arrested, many having been led through city streets by militiamen as a form of public humiliation.

 

This month, the U.S. State Department released its “Trafficking in Persons” report for 2007.  Iran was categorized as a Tier 3 nation, the worst rank in the report. It states that “The Government of Iran does not fully comply with the minimum standards for the elimination of trafficking and is not making significant efforts to do so.” Furthermore, it states that many victims of trafficking are incarcerated or executed for the morality crimes that result. In 2004, Iran passed the Law on Combating Human Trafficking, with severe punishments for convicted traffickers. However, in the last year, there have been no cases involving trafficking. According to the report, Iran has neither improved its protection of victims, instead routinely punishing them as described above, nor its prevention of human trafficking.     

 

Ehteram Shadfar, a member of the One Million Signatures Campaign, was released one day after her detention on June 10. She and another activist, also released, were held for questioning regarding their activities in the campaign.

 

June 13 was the anniversary of an equal rights demonstration held last year, and a gathering was scheduled to take place, but authorities denied the request for permission to assemble.

 

As a result of the press ban on reporting the dress code crackdown, coverage of the abuses women are facing has been circulating via cell phones and blogs.

Qom-based Grand Ayatollah Sanei declared in early June that everyone has the duty to defend women’s rights, and that their rights should be equal to a man’s. He reinforced his statement with evidence that many traditions and reasons supporting gender inequality contradict the Koran and would deny rights to descendents of the Prophet, among others.

 
Amnesty International issued an Urgent Action statement regarding prisoners Hossein Forouhideh and Iraj Naji on May 30. Forouhideh is an Azeri rights activist inside Iran, and has been sentenced to death on charges of spying for Turkey. Naji, his cousin, is facing solitary confinement and possible torture for inciting demonstrations in Iranian Azerbaijan. Amnesty released a second statement on June 7 regarding the pending execution of attempted highjacker Khaled Hardani. His execution date is set for July 4, and he is being held until then in Raja’i Shahr Prison in Karaj. Hardani, an Ahwazi Arab, was charged with threatening national security and “enmity against God,” rather than anything related to the hijacking in 2001.

 
On May 29, four men were hanged for drug trafficking in the town of Birjend in Khorasan Jonoubi Province. On May 17, two men convicted of smuggling drugs were executed in the cities of Bandar Abbas and Bandar Khamir.

 

Security forces arrested Nurali Tabandeh, leader of the prominent Nematollahi Gonabandi Sufi order, on May 21 in the city of Gonabad in northeastern Iran. Tabandeh’s supporters expressed their disapproval through peaceful protest, and they claimed that some followers had been assaulted and detained along with their leader. Tabandeh was taken to Tehran, where he was released ten hours later. According to Radio Free Europe, Sufi orders are seen as a challenge to state-sponsored Islam, and the Iranian government has been attempting to suppress Tabandeh since October, when 300 troops attempted to force him out of his home.

 

On May 22, more than 15 people were arrested in Tabriz after several Azeris called for a demonstration to commemorate the anniversary of the publication of an offensive cartoon in a Persian newspaper in 2006, which resulted in a lengthy and violent conflict in Iranian Azerbaijan last year.

 

Two reporters, Saeed Saedi and Jalal Ghavami, were sentenced to two and a half and three years in prison, respectively, for covering banned protests in Iranian Kurdistan. They had reported on two illegal protests in 2005 and were sentenced in the Kurdish town of Sanandaj.

 

In late May, in the midst of ongoing blockage and filtering of critical websites, Iranian Minister for Culture and Islamic Guidance Mohammad Hossein Saffar Harandi (and former head of the conservative Kayhan newspaper) stated that only insulting or inaccurate websites will be filtered by the government. At around the same time, the Association of Iranian Journalists publicly condemned the Supreme National Security Council’s prohibition on press reporting of sensitive issues. The Iranian press law states that no government actor can force the publication or censorship of articles.

 

Earlier this month, the Association for the Defense of Freedom of the Press in Iran issued a statement opposing the government’s persistent censorship and the new restrictions placed on the press last month. The Association has stated that the increasing levels of censorship have made free reporting impossible, and they demanded that the government and all its agents “end their illegal actions in creating an environment of fear and terror for the press and imposing censorship and promoting self-censorship,” according to Rooz.

Seventy-one students at Amir Kabir University have been summoned to disciplinary committees recently, and of them 17 were expelled and six were arrested. At Karaj Azad University, 93 students were disciplined for dress code violations. Three Amir Kabir students, Nariman Mostafavi, Naser Pouyafar, and Hossein Tarkashvand, were summoned to Iran’s Revolutionary Court. Six additional Amir Kabir students are being held in Section 209 of Evin prison.

 

Several more Amir Kabir students, detained in May for the publication of insulting articles, have allegedly confessed to their charges. The students insisted that the articles had been forged. Judge Hossein Haddad, an interrogator of the Revolutionary Court, confirmed on May 25 that the students are being held in Section 209 of Evin prison.

This month 57 economists addressed president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in an open letter to various newspapers in Iran, criticizing his poor economic policies and blaming him for Iran’s increasing international isolation. They claimed that inflation has risen to 20 percent since Ahmadinejad took office and that the president’s confrontational foreign policy and his commitment to the nuclear program have damaged the economy, driving away foreign investment.