Human rights

CHRI – Lawyers representing workers’ rights activists Esmail Bakhshi and Sepideh Qoliyan say the two are being held unlawfully now that their two-month detention orders have expired. “[Bakhshi’s] detention order ended on March 21 without an extension, which makes his detention a violation of Article 242 of the Criminal Procedures Regulations,” Bakhshi’s lawyer, Farzaneh Zilabi, told the Telegram app channel of the Haft Tappeh sugar mill …

CHRI – Some Internet Users in Iran Warned of Prosecution for Accessing Blacklisted Websites In 2019, Iranian media outlets began reporting on the sudden appearance of branch offices of a “Prosecutor General’s Cyber Division Rapid Reaction Center,” a new state agency that appears to be tasked with monitoring and censoring online content and activities. The center reportedly has offices in …

Radiofarda – Imprisoned Iranian human rights lawyer and defender Nasrin Sotoudeh‘s 33-year jail sentence is final, and she must serve 12 years, the official IRNA news agency reported. Sotoudeh who was arrested in mid-2018, was sentenced in early March to 33 years in prison and 148 lashes. She was subjected to two trials that Amnesty International has called “grossly unfair”. …

CHRI – Sufi political prisoner Sima Entesari was beaten by an inmate who claims she was promised a case review if she carried out the attack, a source with detailed knowledge of the event informed the Center for Human Rights in Iran (CHRI). “One of the prisoners convicted of drug-related offenses initially got into an argument with Ms. Entesari,” said …

Iran-HRM – An appeals court upheld a 13-year prison sentence of human rights attorney Mohammad Najafi who was jailed in 2018 after voicing support for people detained during anti-government protests, the state-run IRNA news agency reported on Sunday, Aril 14, 2019. Mohammad Najafi was sentenced in December to 10 years for “conveying information to a hostile country” through interviews with …

CHRI – Detained defense attorney Amirsalar Davoudi is facing four charges for running a Telegram app channel for lawyers in Iran and giving interviews to foreign news organizations, attorney Vahid Farahani told the Center for Human Rights in Iran (CHRI) on April 16, 2019. Two of the charges brought by Branch 1 of the court of Evin Prison are “propaganda against the …

Radioazmaneh – Yasmine Mohammed is an Arab-Canadian human rights activist, college instructor and writer. Yasmine was raised in a fundamentalist Sunni Muslim family in Canada. At the age of nine, she was forced to wear Hijab and she was sent to an Islamic school. When she was only nineteen years old, she was forced into marriage with an Al-Qaida operative …

CHRI – Iranian actress Maryam Moghaddam (also referred to as Moqadam), has written an open letter to Iran’s Minister of Culture and Islamic Guidance Abbas Salehi asking why she was suddenly barred from working on a movie. “Mr. Minister! This is the state of the film industry you are in charge of: I was pulled from a film project on the …

VOA – Media rights group Reporters Without Borders says Iran has slipped further toward the bottom of its World Press Freedom index because of an increase in arrests of Iranian journalists and citizen-journalists. In its annual press freedom ranking published Thursday, the Paris-based group also known as RSF said Iran dropped six places to 170th out of 180 countries and …

HRW – Iranian authorities should release and quash the convictions of all activists who have been prosecuted for peacefully protesting the country’s compulsory hijab laws, Human Rights Watch said today. In the past week, the authorities arrested two activists – a mother and daughter – for protesting compulsory hijab laws. Iranian officials have prosecuted at least half a dozen activists for …