Social and Political

RFL/RE – A British parliamentary deputy said on September 13 that the husband of British-Iranian aid worker Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, who has been imprisoned in Iran for four years, has told her that his wife’s latest trial has been postponed.Parliamentarian Tulip Siddiq, who represents Zaghari-Ratcliffe’s London-area home district of Hampstead and Kilburn, did not offer details of any possible reasons for …

Al-Arabia – Iran executed champion wrestler Navid Afkari on Saturday despite widespread pleas to spare him, prompting angry reactions from Iranians at home and abroad on social media platforms. Afkari, 27, was arrested during anti-government protests in 2018. He was given two death sentences, six and a half years in prison and 74 lashes for the alleged murder of a water company …

Radiofarda – The European Film Academy and the Berlin International Film Festival, known as Berlinale, have jointly called for the immediate release of renowned Iranian lawyer and human rights defender, Nasrin Sotoudeh, featured in Jafar Panahi’s Golden Bear-winning “Taxi.” Ms. Sotoudeh has been on a hunger strike since August 10, protesting the dire condition of political prisoners and demanding their immediate release …

Radiofarda – Iran said Saturday it condemned a former top judiciary official to 31 years in prison for corruption, one of the heaviest sentences against a former official in the Islamic republic. Akbar Tabari received the jail term after being convicted of “setting up and heading a bribery network”, judiciary spokesman Gholamhossein Esmaili told state television. The high-profile trial of …

Ayatollah Yousef Saanei, a pro-reform Iranian cleric and a critic of the establishment who sided with the opposition movement following the controversial 2009 presidential election, has died. He was 83. Ayatollah Saanei died in a hospital in the holy Shi’ite city of Qom after being hospitalized for two days with a broken hip and wrist, Iranian state media reported.In 2009, …

Amnesty – The secret execution this morning of wrestling champion Navid Afkari, without prior notice to him, his family or lawyer, after a grossly unfair trial, is a horrifying travesty of justice that needs immediate international action.“Navid Afkari was a young man with a promising future ahead of him. Carrying out his death sentence with such utter disregard for the …

The Third Reich and the USSR could not behave as normal nation-states…. Their prime interest was “exporting” their ideological brand, by war if necessary. Regardless of the obvious differences of belief systems and discourse, all ideology-driven movements from Lenin and Hitler to Khomeini and Abu-Bakr al-Baghdadi aim at replacing the biological human with an ideological one, ostensibly to complete the …

Shabtabnews – In a statement today IOPHR condemned the “spineless execution of the Iranian wrestling champion, Mr. Navid Afkari. The statement called the execution a ” desperate attempt by the Iranian regime to implement the hated policy of fearmongering, or achieving “victory through fear”, in order to dissuade the Iranian young men and women from demanding their basic human rights.” …

Radiofarda – Navid Afkari, an Iranian wrester convicted of murder in a case that was condemned by rights groups and U.S. President Donald Trump, has been executed, Iranian state media reported on September 12. Afkari was executed “this morning after legal procedures were carried out at the insistence of the parents and the family of the victim,” the head of the justice …

Al-Arabia – Iran’s coronavirus death toll rose by 116 to 23,029, a health ministry spokeswoman told state TV on Saturday. The total number of identified cases spiked by 2,139 in the last 24 hours to 399,940 in one of the Middle East’s worst-hit countries, Sima Sadat Lari was quoted as saying. Read the latest updates in our dedicated coronavirus section. …