The outbreak of COVID-19 in Iran has continued to threaten the health and safety of imprisoned human rights defenders, like Nasrin Sotoudeh and Yasaman Aryani, in the country’s overcrowded and unhygienic prisons.
His tone was frantic. He was scared and paranoid, deleting his WhatsApp messages as soon as I had read them. Masoud Molavi Vardanjani wanted to speak to someone “in Washington”. I was cautious, too. I am just a journalist, I insisted. Who would I know “in Washington”? And how can I even be sure it’s you, I asked, and not some Iranian regime operative up to some trickery?
The hidden role of a British secret service officer who led the coup that permanently altered the Middle East is to be revealed for the first time since an Observer news story was suppressed in 1985.
Salt storms are an emerging threat for millions of people in north-western Iran, thanks to the catastrophe of Lake Urmia. Once one of the world’s largest salt lakes, and still the country’s largest lake, Urmia is now barely a tenth of its former size.
Leaked official letters newly obtained by Amnesty International reveal that the Iranian government has ignored repeated pleas by senior officials responsible for managing Iran’s prisons for additional resources to control the spread of COVID-19 and treat infected prisoners.
Iranian WHRD Narges Mohammadi who has been sentenced to over 10 years in prison, because of her human rights activities, has been denied telephone contact with her teenage children for almost a year. Narges' children, Kiana and Ali, who live in Exile in France with their father, released a video lamenting the fact that they have not spoken to their mother for 11 months. They asked Iranians to be their voice, so Narges is allowed to call her children.
The supreme leader’s youth-washing strategy could keep detente with the United States off the table for years. In just under a year, Iran will elect a new president. Coming after the U.S. election this November, there is some hope that the occasion could usher in improved U.S.-Iranian relations. Yet, given the way Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei has been narrowing the field of candidates, that seems unlikely.
My name is Mitra Aliabouzar. I was a member of the Islamic Student Association at Tehran Polytechnic (AUT) and Sharif University of Technology (SUT). I was arrested three times after the disputed presidential election in 2009. I left Iran in 2013 and joined the George Washington University (GWU) for a Ph.D. program. I received my doctoral degree in mechanical engineering in 2018 and right now I am a postdoc fellow at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor (UMICH).
Thank you for your invitation. My name is Hajir Attari born in 1982, graduated from Industrial Engineering, Systems Analysis Dept. from Azad University.
