Iran's elected government under President Hassan Rouhani is embroiled in an internal power struggle against hardline factions of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps for control of the country's response to the COVID-19 crisis.
From the depths of Iran’s prisons — perhaps the last place one would expect — two courageous women have demonstrated unparalleled and inspiring leadership during this global crisis. Narges Mohammadi and Nasrin Sotoudeh spent their lives fighting for Iran’s most vulnerable, until becoming the country’s most vulnerable themselves.
A little over four decades ago, when a Shia Muslim cleric named Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini emerged in Iran and on the world political stage as the head of an unprecedented theologico-political project, few people in the West realized that they were witnessing the gestation of a new ideological challenge to the liberal-democratic worldview. For decades after Khomeini launched his Islamist revolution in Iran, the world’s liberal-democratic states failed to grasp that Islamist radicalism was a direct ideological threat, even though from its inception it had proclaimed Western democracy as its main enemy.1
The Iranian economy has been struggling since the establishment of the Islamic Republic in 1979 for a number of reasons, including the government’s hardline foreign policies that challenge major world powers and their tensions with other countries in the Middle East.
Iranian university student Ali Younesi has been arbitrarily detained since 10 April 2020. His family believes he is being held in Tehran’s Evin prison, where he has been denied access to a lawyer and permitted only two brief telephone calls to his family. The Iranian authorities have not provided clear reasons for his arrest. He is a prisoner of conscience targeted solely for his family ties and is at risk of torture or other ill-treatment.
We at the Center for Human Rights in Iran mourn the death of our former colleague Ali Ajami, and express our deepest condolences to his family and friends.
Iranian courts since late April 2020 have sentenced at least 13 people to prison terms, apparently solely for peacefully protesting the Iranian forces’ deadly attack on a civilian airliner and the government’s initial denial of responsibility, Human Rights Watch said today. The authorities should halt all prosecutions that violate the right to peaceful assembly and protest.
Reporters Without Borders (RSF) calls on the Turkish authorities and the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) to do everything possible to guarantee the safety of Iranian journalists who have fled to Turkey and to speed up their resettlement in third countries because their situation has worsened as a result of the coronavirus epidemic.
A court in Iran's second-largest city, Mashhad, has sentenced eight dissident political and civil rights activists to a total of 72 years in jail for calling for the resignation of the country's Supreme Leader.
This interview was conducted by Nasrin Bassiri (N.B.) with Reza Khandan (R.K.)
