Iran: New Arrests of Labor Activists | Human Rights Watch
Overturn Convictions, Drop Charges, and Free Peaceful Union Advocates
(New York) – Iranian authorities should immediately release dozens of labor and independent trade union activists imprisoned for speaking out peacefully in defense of workers, Human Rights Watch said today. Convictions solely for the peaceful exercise of freedom of association and assembly should be quashed, and charges should be dropped against others facing prosecution for these reasons, Human Rights Watch said.
Alireza Akhavan
The latest round of arrests took place in Iran’s Tehran, East Azerbaijan and Kurdistan provinces. The authorities summoned four activists in mid-January 2012 to begin serving long sentences imposed in 2011. On January 28, authorities arrested Alireza Akhavan, a teacher and labor rights activist, in his home in Tehran. It is not know where he is currently being held.
Mohammad Jarahi
On January 18, security forces arrested Mohammad Jarahi in his home in Tabriz. Three days earlier, intelligence agents arrested Shahrokh Zamani, another Tabriz labor rights leader, and summoned two others also in Tabriz. Authorities also arrested Sheis Amani, a prominent rights activist and member of an independent trade union in the city of Sanandaj on January 16. Earlier in the month authorities detained Mehdi Farahi Shandiz and transferred to Ward 350 of Evin prison in Tehran. All those arrested are labor activists or members of independent trade unions not authorized by the government.
Shahrokh Zamani
“Independent trade unions have played a critical role in protecting workers’ rights under Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s presidency,” said Joe Stork, deputy Middle East director at Human Rights Watch. “This latest round of arrests continues a long and ugly tradition of targeting independent trade unions to enforce full state control over these groups.”
Sheys Amani
Authorities initially arrested Zamani on June 7, 2011, in connection with his activities as a member of an independent painters’ syndicate and a board member of the Committee to Pursue the Establishment of Labor Unions. Branch 1 of the Revolutionary Court in Tabriz sentenced him to 11 years in prison for “participating in the organization of an unlawful group opposing the state … with the aim of disrupting national security by way of workers’ strikes and armed rebellion,” “assembly and collusion to further illegal activities,” and “propaganda against the regime.”
Mehdi Farahi Shandiz
In the same case, the court sentenced Jarahi, who was arrested on June 20, to five years in prison for organizing an “unlawful” group called the Democratic Workers Movement, and Nima Pouryaghoub to five years on the same charge plus an additional year for “propaganda against the regime.” Sasan Vahebivash was sentenced to six months for related activities. Pouryaghoub and Vahebivash are engineering students at Tabriz’s Azad University.
Authorities freed the four defendants after they posted bail, but, in November 2011, Branch 6 of the East Azerbaijan appeals’ court confirmed the original sentences handed down by the trial court. Authorities did not summon the defendants to serve their prison terms until this year.
Sasan Vahebivash
According to Iranian media reports, Amani, a prominent labor rights activist in Sanandaj (Kurdistan province) and a board member of the Iran Free Workers’ Union (IFWU), was arrested after he went to the prosecutor’s office in Sanandaj to inquire about the status of two other activists who had been detained earlier in January.
Nima Pouryaghoub
Human Rights Watch is concerned about the well-being of several other prominent labor and trade union activists currently serving prison sentences, including Reza Shahabi, Ali Nejati, Ebrahim Madadi, and Behnam Ebrahimzadeh.
Madadi is vice-president and Shahabi is treasurer of the Syndicate of Workers of Tehran and Suburbs Bus Company (SWTSBC). Madadi is serving a three-and-a-half-year sentence on charges of endangering national security. Shahabi was arrested on June 12, 2010.
Reza Shahabi
A revolutionary court in Tehran tried him of endangering national security and “propaganda against the state” on May 25, 2011, but there has been no ruling in his case yet.
Ali Nejati
According to a source familiar with his case, Shahabi spent 18 months in Tehran’s Evin prison without charge, including several months in solitary confinement, and suffers from serious neck and back pain. Shahabi is in Imam Khomeini hospital in Tehran after ending a 30-day hunger strike on December 22 to protest his detention and the authorities’ refusal to provide proper medical care.
Ebrahim Madadi
Two other activists, Ali Nejati and Behnam Ebrahimzadeh, who are serving one and five-year prison terms, respectively, on national security charges related to their independent trade union activities, also suffer from serious medical conditions. According to information received by Human Rights Watch, both Nejati and Ebrahimzadeh asked for long-term furloughs from prison so they could seek proper medical care, but judicial officials have denied their requests.
Nejati is a former president and current board member of the Haft Tappeh Sugar Cane Workers’ Syndicate (HTSCW), and is in Ahvaz’s Dezful prison in southwest Iran. Ebrahimzadeh is in Evin prison.
Behnam Ebrahimzadeh
The IFWU and the bus workers’ and sugar cane workers’ unions, are among the largest and most active independent trade unions in Iran. Iran’s labor law does not recognize the right to create labor unions independent of government-sanctioned groups. Since 2005, authorities have repeatedly harassed, summoned, arrested, convicted, and sentenced workers who are affiliated with these independent trade unions and harassed their families.
Mansour Osanloo
Most of these arrests have taken place during International Workers’ Day celebrations or strikes the unions have called, often for back wages that have not been paid for months. Mansour Osanlou, the current president of the bus workers’ group, was sentenced to five years in prison on charges of “acting against the national security” and “propaganda against the state” following several arrests between 2005 and 2007. Authorities allowed Osanlou to leave Evin prison in June after he had served about four years of his sentence, but could still summon him to serve the rest. Human Rights Watch called on the judiciary to quash Osanlou’s sentence.
Independent unions have protested amendments to the current labor law introduced by President Ahmadinejad. The amendments, currently being reviewed by Iran’s parliament, make it easier for employers to fire workers and reduce workers’ benefits such as annual vacation days.
Article 22 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), and Article 8 of the International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights (ICESCR) protect the right to form and join labor unions. Iran is a signatory to both of these treaties. Iran is also a member of International Labour Organization (ILO), but has so far refused to sign covenants 87 (Freedom of Association and the Protection of the Right to Organize Convention) and 98 (Right to Organize and Collective Bargaining Convention) of the ILO treaty.
“Labor activists have been at the forefront of the struggle for freedom of association and assembly in Iran, and they have paid a heavy price,” Stork said. “Iranian law should recognize the right to organize independent unions and release activists who have committed no crime other than representing the interests of their constituents.”
via Iran: New Arrests of Labor Activists | Human Rights Watch.
https://creator.zoho.com/servisis/ipi/record-summary/Iran_Prisoner_List/236584000000311511/
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Iran Steps Up Arrests of Journalists and Bloggers
Marzieh Rasouli
The judicial authorities in Iran have arrested at least half a dozen journalists and bloggers over the past few weeks, according to their acquaintances, opposition Web sites and rights groups. The moves appear to be part of a pre-emptive campaign of intimidation to thwart protests surrounding the parliamentary elections that are scheduled to be held in early March.
The arrests of the journalists and bloggers, including two prominent women whose blog posts are widely read in Iran, have not been reported by the official news media. Rights groups and people who know the detained journalists said the government apparently wanted word of the arrests to spread informally, to heighten the atmosphere of fear and paranoia.
It also was unclear what specific charges, if any, had been lodged against those who were arrested. None seem to have been politically active or to have published anything that might be considered seditious since the last major Iranian government crackdown on free expression in February 2011. At that time, the authorities arrested a large number of journalists as part of what turned out to be a successful effort to subvert any ambition by Iran’s largely silenced political opposition to celebrate the revolutions that were then sweeping Tunisia and Egypt.
The government “can’t come out publicly and name them or charge them with anything, because they can’t justify why they’re holding them,” said Hadi Ghaemi, executive director of the International Campaign for Human Rights in Iran, an advocacy group in New York that has researched the arrests, adding that the journalists and bloggers were “prominent enough that the news will get around quickly and intimidate others.”
Parastou Dokouhaki
Friends of the two arrested women, Parastoo Dokouhaki and Marzieh Rasouli, have started aWeb site to publicize their situation. Ms. Dokouhaki, a rights activist whose blog, Written by a Woman, attracted a wide following, has been held in Evin Prison in Tehran since Jan. 15, when agents raided her home and confiscated her laptop computer and other items. In a posting on Tuesday, the Web site said that Ms. Dokouhaki’s family had been told by prosecutors that she was in “temporary detention,” a catchall term that could leave her incarcerated indefinitely.
The site said that Ms. Rasouli, an award-winning literary and cultural journalist and social blogger who once worked for the Iranian Student News Agency as well as reformist newspapers, was arrested Jan. 17. Apparently, the site said, someone later used her seized laptop and e-mail account to send messages to friends that word of her arrest was a “mere rumor,” heightening the concern about her. She too was taken to Evin Prison, the site said, but unlike Ms. Dokouhaki, she had not been permitted to call her family.
A third journalist, Sahamoddin Bouraghani, who was the national press director for the Ministry of Culture during the tenure of a former president, the reformist Mohammad Khatami, was arrested Jan. 17 as well, rights activists said.
At least three more journalists were arrested the previous week, activists said, including Fatemeh Kheradmand, a freelance health and social reporter; Ehsan Houshmandzadeh, an ethnic researcher; and Said Madani, a former university professor who edited Social Welfare, a quarterly journal. The Committee to Project Journalists, a New York-based advocacy group that has called Iran one of the most repressive countries for press freedom, with at least 42 journalists imprisoned in 2011, said last week that it had documented the arrests of at least seven journalists there since Jan. 7.
“Tehran is sending a message to the opposition media that dissent will be treated with a heavy hand,” said Mohamed Abdel Dayem, the group’s program coordinator for the Middle East and North Africa. “Not only are Iranian authorities detaining more journalists, but they also persist in mistreating those who have spent time in official custody.”
Human Rights Watch, in an annual appraisal issued last Sunday, said that Iran “imprisoned more journalists and bloggers than any other country” in 2011, and that Iran’s judiciary “works hand in hand with security and intelligence forces to harass, imprison and convict opposition and rights activists.”
Top law enforcement officials in Iran have issued cryptic warnings in recent weeks about hidden enemies they say are scheming to make trouble during the parliamentary election, which is scheduled for March 2. But they have not identified any by name or talked about the arrests of specific individuals.
The election will be the first time that Iran’s conservative Islamic hierarchy will face what amounts to a national plebiscite since the 2009 presidential election.
The official results announced then showed the conservative incumbent, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, winning by a suspiciously lopsided margin; his two major opponents, Mir Hussein Moussavi and Mehdi Karroubi, said the voting had been rigged. Both opponents have been under house arrest for nearly a year.
Even so, they have managed to get messages to followers telling them to boycott the elections. A low turnout in March would be an acute embarrassment for Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader, who has described Iran as the Middle East’s only true democracy.
Activists said it was particularly troubling that none of the latest journalists to be arrested had written anything politically provocative. Ms. Dokouhaki’s last blog post, on Dec. 31, for example, was an emotional narrative about her inability to cope with the death of her father. According to Mr. Ghaemi, Ms. Rasouli “was never politically active and never wrote about political affairs.”
Some speculated that they were arrested because they knew how to navigate their way around the Internet and to transmit information to their circles of friends abroad.
Ms. Dokouhaki studied at the University of London’s School of Oriental and African Studies, where she received a master’s degree in media studies in 2007 and became acquainted with researchers and translators for the BBC’s Persian service, which the Iranian government has vilified as an agent of subversion and imperialist arrogance. Ms. Rasouli also had a large number of contacts outside Iran.
Mehrad Vaezinejad, a contributor to the BBC and a friend of both women, said by telephone from London that the timing of the arrests so close to the election and the dearth of official information reflected the judicial authorities’ dual purposes. “One was to make reporting inside the country very difficult during the 2012 elections,” he said. “Two was to make an example out of Marzieh and Parastou and instill fear in the hearts of potential citizen-journalists or political activists.”
via Iran Steps Up Arrests of Journalists and Bloggers – NYTimes.com.
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