Shabtabnews – IOPHR in a letter addressed to Professor Javaid Rehman – the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the human rights situation in the Islamic Republic of Iran stated that ” in the absence of serious and practical action at the international level to address this blatant and undeniable violation of human rights in Iran, the growing trend of executions …

Shabtabnews – Iran has gone to great lengths to arrest and detain religious minorities, including Christians, Baha’is, Sunni Muslims, Sufis, and spiritualists. The Iranian government has taken it a step further and also targeted those who peacefully dissent from the government’s preferred religious views, particularly women, nontheists, and members of the LGBTI community. Amid country-wide protests in Iran over the …

Al-Arabia – The US and Iran ended indirect talks on reviving the now-defunct 2015 nuclear deal on Wednesday without any breakthrough, according to officials, with Washington accusing Tehran of not being ready to “to revive the deal or bury it.” “Two intense days of proximity talks in Doha on #JCPOA. Unfortunately, not yet the progress the EU team as coordinator had hoped …

RFL/RE – Many relatives of civic and labor activists detained in Iran say security agents are issuing threats if they don’t remain silent about their loved ones’ cases. The families of Jafar Ebrahimi, Anisha Asadollahi, Rasul Badaghi, Mohammad Habibi, Hassan Saeedi, Reza Shahabi, Eskandar Lotfi, Shaban Mohammadi, Keyvan Mohtadi, and Massud Nikkhah — activists who have been detained due to their participation …

Iranwire – The Iranian-born wrestler Melika Balali won gold at the women’s British Senior Wrestling Championship last weekend. On the podium in Manchester, the 22-year-old, a member of the Scottish national freestyle wrestling team, held up a poster that read: “STOP forced hijab. I have the right to be a wrestler.” Balali is more than a top sports practitioner with …

Iranwire – Well-known Persian Twitter personality Hossein Shanbehzadeh has been summoned to Evin Prison to begin serving a three-and-a-half-year prison sentence. The 34-year-old tweeted on Thursday after announcing the summons: A literary editor and activist, Shanbehzadeh was known for his lyrical and tongue-in-cheek posts about Iranian society and culture. He had been on a six-month hiatus from the platform since …

Iranwire – Earlier this month a photographer named Hoda Rostami came under a week of intense and sustained criticism on social media. The reason was her role as executive director of Fam Trip, an Islamic Republic-backed tourism initiative that stands for “Familiarization Trip”. Foreign visitors have lavished praise on the program on their Instagram pages, while Rostami herself has posted …

Iranwire – A week after medical staff “aiding and abetting” in abortions became a criminal offence in Iran, the authorities have issued a blanket ban on contraceptives being placed on public display. A letter from the Food and Drug Administration leaked on social media on Wednesday orders Iranian pharmacies to take stock of any contraceptive products such as condoms and “place them …

Iranwire – On Monday two large Iranian steel firms, Mobarakeh Steel Company in Isfahan and Khuzestan Steel Industries, were reported to have been the target of large-scale cyberattacks. So severe was the impact on the latter that its production line temporarily ground to a halt. A hacktivist group calling itself Predatory Sparrow – an inverted echo of Iranian state-backed cyber-crime …

gatestoneinstitute.org – One of the leaked documents, which contains “a shoot to kill order” for guards in the camp’s watchtowers, confirms that these camps are indeed prisons. Another leaked report stipulates how detainees are to be transported from one site to an alternate location: ankle shackles, handcuffs and hoods. Previous leaks of official documents, unauthorized films, commercial satellite images and …