Iranian Republic

Iran’s Nuclear Challenge at a Crossroads: Dilemmas of a Threshold State

Diplomacy between Iran and the world’s major powers—Britain, China, France, Germany, Russia and the United States—over bringing Iran back into compliance with the 2015 nuclear agreement (the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action or JCPOA) has stalled. A senior State Department official has said that the United States is considering “other tools … to increase the pressure on Iran,” which is a nuclear “threshold” state, to break the impasse. Negotiations are playing out against the backdrop of the latest report from the International Atomic Energy Agency that Iran has accelerated its nuclear program and breached the 2015 agreement’s constraints on uranium enrichment. Based on the IAEA’s findings on Iran’s stock of fissile material, independent nuclear experts calculate that Iran could acquire sufficient weapons-grade material to produce a single nuclear bomb in as little as three weeks.

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Europe & Human Rights in the Middle East and North Africa (Iran)

In Iran, people’s fundamental human rights are violated on a daily basis. It is the only country in the world to have executed juvenile offenders in 2020, while the UN special rapporteur on the situation of human rights in Iran, Javaid Rehman, has said that “women and girls continue to be treated as second class citizens”. Religious minority and ethnic groups, as well as the LGBTIQ+ community, are deprived of basic human rights, facing hate speech, harassment, and persecution. Human rights defenders pay a heavy price for their activism, being prosecuted and jailed under the pretext of so-called “security” crimes.

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Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe: Betrayed by Britain

It’s a haunting image and it has branded itself on the British consciousness over the past two weeks: Richard Ratcliffe on hunger strike outside the Foreign Office in London, as he begs the UK government to pay a decades-old debt so that his wife, mother to their seven-year-old daughter, can come home from Iran, where she has been detained on spurious charges for more than five years.

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Iran: Population Law Violates Women’s Rights

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Letter to the NDP Leader from Three Iranian-Canadian Community Organizations Regarding the NDP Foreign Policy Stance

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Iran is suffering from an epidemic of torture

Last month, a 49-year-old man named Shahin Naseri died in prison under suspicious circumstances after he provided witness testimony about the torture of wrestler Navid Afkari. Afkari, a high-profile protester, was unjustly arrested by state agents, sentenced to death following a grossly unfair trial and executed in secret in September 2020.

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A 26-year-old woman is exposing abuse in Iranian prisons

On Monday, around 30 members of the Iranian security forces raided the home of 26-year-old Sepideh Gholian, a journalist and labor rights activist. She was forcibly removed from her home as other agents took away the mobile phones of every member of her family.

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What is going on between Iran and Azerbaijan?

Tensions have increased between Iran and Azerbaijan in the past few weeks. However, relations between the two neighbours were unstable even earlier, especially following the war between Azerbaijan and Armenia last autumn.

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The 13 crises facing Iran

Ebrahim Raisi, the eighth president of Iran, has taken over at a time when the Islamic Republic is facing a series of major potential crises. Over the next several decades, these crises could have consequences that will not only affect Iran itself, but may reverberate across the region as well. This article will address the 13 crises facing Raisi’s government and Iranian society more broadly.

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A DECADE OF DEATHS IN CUSTODY UNPUNISHED AMID SYSTEMIC IMPUNITY FOR TORTURE IN IRAN

Iranian authorities have failed to provide accountability for at least 72 deaths in custody since January 2010, despite credible reports that they resulted from torture or other ill-treatment or the lethal use of firearms and tear gas by officials, said Amnesty International following yesterday’s reports of yet another suspicious death in custody.

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