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.
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.
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.
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.
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.”
"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.
“A few hours ago agents came to our house and took away my husband Mehdi Hajati to enforce a one-year prison sentence,” Hajati’s wife Zohreh Rastegari tweeted on June 2, 2019. A member of the Shiraz City Council, Hajati had been arrested in October 2018 and held for 10 days for seeking the release of two local Baha’is who had been arrested for practicing their faith, which is severely persecuted by the Iranian government.
On this edition of Your Call, we’ll talk about US foreign policy under the Trump administration. The administration has been escalating tensions with Iran, the European Union, and China. Who is really making US foreign policy decisions, and what will the fallout of the United States' aggressive rhetoric be?
A revolutionary court in the city of Bushehr in southern Iran sentenced seven members of the Baha’i faith to three years in prison each for allegedly answering questions about their religious beliefs to Muslim guests in their homes.
Responding to the news that Iranian human rights lawyer Amirsalar Davoudi has been sentenced to 30 years in prison and 111 lashes for his human rights work, including publicizing violations through a channel he set up on the Telegram mobile messaging app and giving media interviews, Amnesty International’s Research and Advocacy Director for the Middle East and North Africa, Philip Luther, said: “This shockingly harsh sentence is an outrageous injustice. Amirsalar Davoudi is blatantly being punished for his work defending human rights.
