RFL/RE – Reports from Iran say the authorities have prevented former reformist President Mohammad Khatami from leaving his residence in Tehran to attend a meeting. The opposition Sahamnews website reported late on October 18 that Khatami was due to meet with his former ministers at his Baran foundation, but security forces told him he was not allowed to leave his house. …

RFL/RE – U.S. Ambassador Nikki Haley has urged the UN Security Council to follow the United States’ example and address what she called Iran’s “destructive conduct” in the Middle East rather than focusing on the 2015 nuclear deal. “Judging Iran by the narrow confines of the nuclear deal misses the true nature of the threat,” Haley said during a council debate …

Al-Arabia – Iran’s elite Islamic Revolutionary Guards said on Thursday that the country’s ballistic missile programme would accelerate despite pressure from the United States and European Union to suspend it, the semi-official Tasnim news agency reported. In a major US policy shift, President Donald Trump last Friday refused to certify Tehran’s compliance with a landmark 2015 nuclear deal, signalling he would …

Al-Arabia – The Political Coordinator of the Saudi Mission in the United Nations, spokeswoman Manal Hassan Radwan, in her speech on Wednesday, during a meeting of the Security Council on the Middle East that Iran has taken advantage of lifting sanctions to destabilize the region. Saudi Arabia’s delegate at the United Nations also spoke on the kingdom’s position on Palestine, Syria …

VOA — U.S. Ambassador Nikki Haley lashed out Wednesday at Iran for what she called a “laundry list” of bad behavior, and she criticized the U.N. Security Council for not holding Tehran accountable. “Every six months the Security Council is presented with a laundry list of bad news but only somehow manages to only hear the good news,” Haley said, referring …

CHRI – Iranian judicial officials are misrepresenting Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe’s past jobs and her British citizenship to persuade the UK government to negotiate with the Iranian government for her release, her husband, Richard Ratcliffe, told the Center for Human Rights in Iran (CHRI). “He [the Tehran prosecutor] emphasized that she has a British husband, that she is British-Iranian and worked for the …

CHRI – A reformist political activist who fled Iran in 2011 after years of being harassed by the Intelligence Ministry was summoned to the Revolutionary Court in Evin Prison upon returning to the country. A source close to Sedigheh Vasmaghi, who had been sentenced to prison in absentia, told the Center for Human Rights in Iran (CHRI) that she was detained for …

CHRI – A few days after an Iranian Appeals Court upheld a five-year prison sentence against a member of Iran’s nuclear deal-negotiating team, Intelligence Minister Mahmoud Alavi insisted that the defendant, Abdolrasoul Dorri Esfahani, was innocent. “The authority in charge of matters concerning espionage is the Intelligence Ministry’s counter-intelligence division, and as far as this division is concerned, Mr. Dorri Esfahani …

Amnesty – The Iranian authorities are making a mockery of juvenile justice and misleading the Iranian public by claiming that the scheduled execution of Amirhossein Pourjafar, a teenager who was arrested at 16, is lawful. The organization emphasized that international law absolutely prohibits the use of the death penalty against individuals who were below 18 at the time of the crime …

Al-Monitor – In his first reaction to US President Donald Trump’s Oct. 13 speech on the new policy toward Tehran, Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei slammed him for his tone, but stated that “we will not tear up the [nuclear] deal before the other party does so.“ This is the first response since Trump’s speech of Iran’s highest-ranking official. In his address about …