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Iranwire – Zeinab Jalalian, a Kurdish political prisoner serving a life sentence in Yazd Central Prison, has been deprived of the right to in-person visits with her family by order of the Ministry of Intelligence.
According to the Kurdistan Human Rights Network, Jalalian, now in her seventeenth year of incarceration, was recently denied visitation rights with her family. Since her transfer to Yazd prison five years ago, she has only been able to meet with her family once.
Last week, Jalalian was transferred to Farrokhi Hospital in Yazd with handcuffs and ankle shackles after suffering from months of pain on her right side. Despite objections from both prison guards and hospital staff, she was forced to undergo a CT scan while still shackled.
When she requested a family visit, prison officials informed her that she had been banned from receiving visitors. Some of her relatives, who had traveled from northwestern Mako to central Yazd for the visit, were forced to return after learning of the ban near Isfahan.
Kurdish women’s rights activist Zeinab Jalalian was born in 1982 and has been in prison since December 2007, serving the harshest sentence among female political prisoners in Iran.
In 2009, she was sentenced on charges of “waging war against God” for her involvement in the PJAK opposition group. She was originally sentenced to death, but the sentence was reduced to life imprisonment in 2011.
