Iranhumanrights.org – Abbas Lesani, an Azeri ethnic rights activist, is being tried for advocating for state recognition of his mother tongue and making a speech at his friend’s wedding calling for an end to the discrimination of Azeris in Iran. Speaking in an interview with the Center for Human Rights in Iran (CHRI) on April 10, 2017, Lesani said his …

PayvandNews – Until only a few weeks ago, Iran’s hardliners lacked a candidate of any stature in Iran’s forthcoming presidential elections in May 2017. These principlists floated names of people such as Saeed Jalili, a former negotiator on Iran’s nuclear dossier during the Ahmadinejad presidency, and Tehran’s mayor Mohammad Baghir Ghalibaf (who contested the presidency in 2005 and in 2013), …

RFL/RE – Iran’s incumbent president has registered to run in next month’s national election, a vote that is shaping up to be a referendum on the landmark 2015 nuclear agreement with world powers. News reports said Hassan Rohani, 68, submitted the necessary paperwork at the Interior Ministry in Tehran  on April 14, the fourth day of the registration period. President …

Al-Arabia – The United States on Thursday added the brother of Iran’s most high-profile military chief Qassem Soleimani to its sanctions list, accusing him of overseeing torture and other abuses at Tehran’s Evin Prison. The measure from the US Treasury Department targets both Sohrab Soleimani and the Tehran Prisons Organization. Soleimani is the younger brother of Major General Qassem Soleimani, who …

Iran Human Rights – A prisoner who was sentenced to death on six counts of murder charges was hanged in public in the city of Arak (Markazi province).   According to a report by the Iranian state-run media, ISNA, the execution was carried out on Thursday April 13 in front of a crowd of people. The report identifies the prisoner as …

IRAN HUMAN RIGHTS – The 9th annual report of the organization Iran Human Rights (IHR) on the death penalty in Iran shows that in 2016 at least 530 people were executed in the Islamic Republic of Iran. READ FULL REPORT IN PDF HERE: http://iranhr.net/media/files/Rapport_iran_2016-GB-280317-BD.pdf The 2016 annual report is being published with only a few months left in Hassan Rouhani’s first presidential period. A …

Iranhumanrights.org – A month before Iranians head to the polls for the presidential and council elections, a heated exchange between the judiciary and the Intelligence Ministry has highlighted the growing tension over social media between different political factions in the Islamic Republic. Several administrators of 12 reformist channels on the popular Telegram application who were arrested in March 2017 have …

Al-monitor – In the aftermath of the 2009 post-presidential election protests in Iran, social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube became popular platforms to disseminate videos and information from inside the country to the outside world. In response, authorities quickly blocked the sites, ultimately slowing their growth domestically. That restriction created an opportunity for a messaging app called Telegram to take …

Al-monitor – An interview given by Asghar Farhadi to an Israeli journalist has become the subject of new controversy in Iran. On March 20, the Israeli daily Haaretz published a May 2016 interview with the Oscar-winning director on the sidelines of the Cannes Film Festival in which he said that his “only hope” for solving the problems between Iran and Israel is the people, arguing that …

PayvandNews – Ayatollah Khomeini once declared that if it weren’t for the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), there would be no revolutionary Iran. In many ways, he was right. From its humble roots among disorganized militias fighting the Shah, the IRGC has been at the heart of almost every major historical turn in Iran’s modern era. It defended the homeland …