Iranian Republic

A pre-election strike on Iran? -Tabish Khair

Is Iran being set up for a ‘limited scale conflict’ just before the U.S. presidential election? This is a suspicion that might be far from the minds of North and West European leaders, hailing from countries that, since World War II, have been sceptical of war, especially in their own neighbourhoods. But Iran is not really in their neighbourhood. Will countries like Germany, France or Brexiting-U.K. have the conviction or coherence to stand up for Iran, which has been pushed into a corner by the one-sided withdrawal of Donald Trump’s U.S. from the international nuclear deal brokered under former U.S. President Barack Obama? It remains one of the great ironies of politics today that Mr. Trump is such good friends with North Korea, which seems to have no intention of abandoning its nuclear weapons, and so belligerent towards Iran, which did sign an international nuclear deal!

• 4284

Iran: Urgent medical treatment needed for detainees with life-threatening conditions – UN experts

UN human rights experts* today expressed serious concern that Iran continues to deny appropriate healthcare to detainees, despite repeated calls.

• 2

Women Face Weeks of Interrogation, Poor Prison Conditions

The Iranian judiciary should release three women labor activists and a journalist who are still in jail two months after they were detained following a May Day demonstration in Tehran protesting the difficult economic condition workers face, Human Rights Watch said today. The four detainees appear to be detained solely because of their participation in the peaceful assembly.

• 2

Activists Face Fresh Trumped-up Charges in New Trial

Civil society activists Atena Daemi and Golrakh Ebrahimi Iraee have been charged with “propaganda against the regime” and “insulting the Supreme Leader,” adding to previous charges against them. Although human rights organizations and activists regard the new charges against the activists as harsh, the trial differed from previous hearings in that lawyers for the defendants were able to review their clients’ files ahead of the session.

• 6

Iran Among the Ruins - Vali Nasr

Over the last seven years, social upheavals and civil wars have torn apart the political order that had defined the Middle East ever since World War I. Once solid autocracies have fallen by the wayside, their state institutions battered and broken, and their national borders compromised. Syria and Yemen have descended into bloody civil wars worsened by foreign military interventions.

• 4649

Interview With Nazanin Boniadi: “Silence is Not an Option”

As a girl visiting her birth country of Iran, British actress Nazanin Boniadi got a taste of the severely restricted rights women there live with on a daily basis. That experience inspired her to get educated about women’s and human rights issues in the country, and to one day work to improve them.

• 4673

More than 1 million people join global campaign to demand Iranian government release Nasrin Sotoudeh

More than a million people in more than 200 countries and territories across the globe have come together to express their outrage at the sentencing of prominent Iranian human rights lawyer Nasrin Sotoudeh to 38 years and six months in prison and 148 lashes after two grossly unfair trials, Amnesty International announced today, as signatures demanding her release were handed in to Iranian embassies around the world.

• 5

Iran: Deterioration of the medical situation of Ms. Narges Mohammadi

The Observatory has been informed by the League for the Defence of Human Rights in Iran (LDDHI) about the deterioration of the medical condition of Ms. Narges Mohammadi, a journalist, Spokesperson and Vice-President of the Defenders of Human Rights Center (DHRC) [1], who is serving a 16-year prison sentence. Ms. Narges Mohammadi suffers from several very serious health conditions, including a pulmonary embolism and a neurological disorder that results in partial paralysis. Her health condition is exacerbated by the authorities’ refusal to allow her adequate medical care in or out of prison.

Political Prisoner Stabbed to Death in Tehran Penitentiary Three Months After Protesting Unsafe Conditions

June 11, 2019 – Political prisoner Alireza Shirmohammadali was stabbed to death in the Greater Tehran Central Penitentiary (GTCP) after he was unlawfully kept in a ward that holds inmates convicted of dangerous crimes, his lawyer informed the Center for Human Rights in Iran (CHRI). “This was a preventable death and resulted from gross negligence on the part of the authorities,” said Hadi Ghaemi, CHRI’s executive director. “The judiciary has been repeatedly warned of the dangers of its failure to separate political prisoners from inmates convicted of violent crimes.”

• 3

Century-old journals reveal Iranian women's quiet resistance

"For me, it was like listening to women talking back to me from a hundred years ago," says Safaneh Mohaghegh Neyshabouri. As she read the journals, she discovered just how different these people were from the stereotype of women from that time, known as the Qajar era.

• 23