Iran-HRM Authorities intensified pressures and harassment of Iranian journalists and reporters to silence criticism of state policies. There are numerous reports that the intelligence agents in the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) have contacted several social media activists, threatening them not to post content that criticizes Iran’s Chief Justice and presidential candidate Ebrahim Raisi, otherwise they will be in “trouble”. Several …

Iran-HRM – Iran court sentences six Baha’is citizens to 73 years of prison A revolutionary court in Iran has sentenced six Baha’i citizens to a total of 73 years and 6 months in prison. Borhan Esmaili, Maryam Bashir, Faranak Sheikhi, Hayedeh Ram, Minoo Bashir and Derna Esmaili, six Baha’i citizens living in Shiraz and Borazjan, were sentenced by the Revolutionary …

(HRW) – Iranian authorities have engaged in a campaign of harassment and abuse against families of people killed in the Iranian Revolutionary Guard’s downing of Ukraine International Airlines Flight 752 in January 2020, Human Right Watch said today. On April 6, 2021, Iranian authorities announced that they had indicted 10 people for their role in the incident but have not provided any …

Iran Human Rights (IHR) – Six Baluch prisoners on death row for drug-related charges, were secretly executed in Birjand Central Prison in late April. According to the Baloch Activists Campaign, six Baluch men were executed in Birjand Central Prison on April 24. They had all been sentenced to death on drug-related charges. One of them has been named as Javad …

Al-Monitor – Iranians continue to react to the decision to bar well-known Reformists and centrists from running in next month’s presidential elections. Iran’s Guardian Council, a 12-member unelected body charged with vetting candidates, announced the final list of approved candidates earlier this week, and many prominent presidential hopefuls from the Reformist camp were absent. The most notable disqualification continues to be former parliament speaker …

Al-Arabia – One person died and two others were wounded in an explosion at a petrochemical complex in southern Iran on Wednesday, state news agency IRNA reported. The governor of the city of Asaluyeh in Bushehr province, where the explosion occurred, said the incident was due to the explosion of the oxygen transmission pipeline to two petrochemical companies in the …

Iranwire – Prominent activist Faezeh Hashemi has spoken publicly about Ali Larijani’s surprise ousting from the presidential race, stating that in doing so, Iran’s leadership had abandoned all pretense of an authentic election. The Guardian Council announced on May 25 that it had disqualified Ali Larijani, former speaker of parliament and a figure trusted by Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, from …

Iranwire – Effat Mahbaz lost her brother and husband during the massacres of political dissidents in the late 1980s. In that period, she herself spent seven years being tortured in Evin prison. Now, in a letter to Jamila Alam al-Hoda, the wife of Ebrahim Raeesi – a member of the Khomeneist “death panel” that oversaw the killings in 1988, and …

RFL/RE – Outgoing Iranian President Hassan Rohani says he has urged the country’s supreme leader to widen the field in next month’s presidential election after only seven candidates were approved and several of his high-profile allies were rejected. Rohani said during a weekly cabinet meeting on May 26 that he wished the Guardians Council would select more candidates to ensure …

VOA – Former U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has made more detailed allegations about Iran’s secretive relationship with al-Qaida, rekindling a debate about how the United States should respond to the decades-old cooperation between its Mideast rival and the anti-American terrorist network.   In an interview that aired Friday on VOA Persian’s TV channel, the former top U.S. diplomat, who …