Latest news with #EvinPrison
Irish Times
9 hours ago
- Politics
- Irish Times
Growing concern about fate of Iranian political prisoners during conflict with Israel
A Dublin-based Iranian woman has called for increased attention to be focused on Iran 's political prisoners, after her brother was removed from the area of the Tehran prison where he was being held and taken to an unknown location. Aida Younesi (31), a software engineer, said her brother Ali (25), was taken from the infamous Evin Prison on Wednesday by men who reportedly said they were bringing him for questioning. Since then, her family has no idea of his whereabouts. Ali Younesi was a university student when he and his friend, Amirhossein Moradi, were arrested in 2020. They were sentenced to 16 years in prison in 2022 for charges that Amnesty International listed as 'gathering and colluding to commit crimes against national security', 'spreading propaganda against the system' and 'destruction of public property', as well as their families' 'real or perceived ties' to the People's Mojahedin Organisation of Iran (PMOI), an opposition group based outside Iran. Amnesty International has said trials in Iran are 'systematically unfair, resulting in arbitrary detentions. Due process violations included denial of the right to a lawyer from the time of arrest, admission of torture-tainted 'confessions' as evidence and summary trials.' READ MORE Aida said she believed that Ali was involved in peaceful student protests – which broke out after Iranian authorities admitted that Iran's Revolutionary Guards fired missiles at a Ukraine International Airlines passenger plane, killing 176 people – and was arrested to be made an 'example' of. Ali was a gold medal recipient in both Iran's National Astronomy Olympiad in 2017 and the International Astronomy and Astrophysics Olympiad held in China in 2018. Amnesty International said Ali and Moradi were beaten by ministry of intelligence agents and held in prolonged solitary confinement in harsh conditions to extract forced confessions. The human rights organisation has called Ali a 'prisoner of conscience'. Ali Younesi and his father, Mir-Yousef Younesi's father, Mir-Yousef, was later arrested in 2022 – she believes this was to put pressure on Ali and the rest of the family not to be vocal. Mir-Yousef (71) remains in Evin prison, to the family's knowledge. Younesi said he is suffering from various health problems, including diabetes, and that he lost hearing in one ear after he was imprisoned. She became emotional as she described her father. 'I might be biased but I think he's the kindest, best dad I could have got. You can imagine growing up in Iran ... as a woman it has complications, but when I had my dad as my supporter in every matter it felt really good, it felt safe. He's really kind, he's reliable ... He has a big heart.' She said Ali was constantly curious, with 'a good reputation for nice humour and a smiley, kind face.' Israel has been bombarding Iran for a week , with Iran retaliating using drones and ballistic missiles. On Monday, US president Donald Trump urged people in Tehran – a city of 10 million people – to evacuate. But prisoners have no way of doing that, Younesi said. 'As far as I know ... there is no shelter ... I want my dad, my brother and all political prisoners to be free. I wanted it every day. But nowadays, I want it even more ... seeing the danger that they are in.' There are no official numbers stating how many political prisoners Iran holds, though they are believed to include about 20 European nationals: foreign and dual nationals can be held by the Iranian regime as bargaining chips, rights groups say. Many political prisoners were arrested during and following the 2022 Woman, Life, Freedom protests that emerged after the death in police custody of Mahsa Amini , who was arrested for allegedly violating a headscarf law. In 2023 Iranian human-rights activist Narges Mohammadi was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize while locked up in Evin Prison. She was released on medical grounds at the end of last year. 'The Middle East is in fire and blood. [Iranian supreme leader] Ali Khamenei took us to hell promising us heaven. [Israeli prime minister Binyamin] Netanyahu is doing the same – promising freedom and democracy, delivering destruction,' she said this week. On Thursday the New York-based Centre for Human Rights in Iran said 'there is growing fear that Iranian authorities may use the cover of war to carry out ... executions [of political prisoners], using them as tools of reprisal and intimidation to further silence dissent and instil fear across the population.' A report by the UN's Deputy High Commissioner for Human Rights, Nada Al-Nashif, found that at least 975 people were executed in Iran last year, including about 31 women and one child. In a statement , the Dublin-based organisation Front Line Defenders said that the day after Israel attacked Iran , a female human rights defender, Motahareh Gounei, was arrested in Tehran following a social-media post in which she criticised the Iranian leadership. 'As the war escalates and international actors remain silent, detained human rights defenders are at high risk,' the organisation said. Since June 13th, it said those in Evin Prison had reported limited access to calls and had 'expressed the feeling of being held in limbo while exposed to air strikes, fearing for their families and having their lives in the hands of warmongers, who have no respect for human life and rights.' It called for the immediate release of human rights defenders, naming 15, including Golrokh Iranee, Nasrin Javadi, Reza Khandan and Zia Nabavi. For Younesi, attention on this issue is urgent, particularly during a war. 'Any political, any human-rights organisation should increase their voice and their concern about political prisoners in Iran,' she said. 'Iran's regime has a really bad history of tightening control and using more force when international attention shifts away from human rights.'
Sky News
a day ago
- Politics
- Sky News
Daughter of human rights lawyer held in Iranian prison in area targeted by Israeli missiles begs for his release
The daughter of a human rights lawyer held in a prison located in an area targeted by Israeli missile strikes has begged for his release. Mehraveh Khandan's father, 60-year-old Reza Khandan, has been in Evin prison since December, serving a sentence of four years and one month for charges of "assembly and collusion" and "propaganda against the regime" for producing pins opposing the mandatory wearing of the hijab. The prison is located in Tehran 's district 3, which is subject to an evacuation order issued by Israel on Monday due to its military targeting the area with missile and drone strikes. After Donald Trump said the city should be evacuated "immediately", Mehraveh, 25, shared a tearful video on Instagram, asking: "How can he leave Tehran, he is in prison?" This is "one of the most helpless and hopeless times of my life", Mehraveh told Sky News. She said she was imagining her father sitting in prison and hearing the explosions nearby, without having a reliable source of information to find out what was going on, as he is only allowed access to information via Iranian state media. Mehraveh, who managed to speak to her father on the phone since, said he told her the explosions "reminded him of the Iran-Iraq war when he was a soldier". "I can imagine he was [scared]," she added after last talking to him on Wednesday morning. Mehraveh said she posted her video plea because it was "the only way we could raise our voice above the deafening noise of criminal rulers endlessly hurling taunts at each other". She hopes that pressure from the international community could force Iranian authorities to release her father, as permitted under Iran's wartime law. "The Islamic Republic regime has shown in times of crisis, it only resorts to increasing internal repression, but I hope this time they react to international pressure differently," Mehraveh said. Reza, along with other inmates in Evin prison, also wrote a letter to the authorities to ask for their release, saying that the prison lacked shelters and alarms to protect against missile and drone attacks. "Not releasing them from prison is putting their lives in danger," Mehraveh said. Knowing her father is being held in a place so vulnerable to strikes was bringing her "a lot of anxiety, sleep-related issues and trouble eating", she explained. "Although I live in a safe environment, I feel captured and trapped most of the time," said Mehraveh, who is currently in Amsterdam studying fine arts. Her mother, Nasrin Sotoudeh, 62, who is also a prominent human rights lawyer, was facing a lot of stress as she was trying to get her husband released. Their daughter is also "so worried" for her younger brother Nima, 17, who fled Tehran with Nasrin to escape the Israeli attacks. Neither Mehraveh nor her mother have been able to visit Reza in prison, and the one time Nima was allowed to, the teenager was "traumatised" after being "beaten by guards". Mehraveh said she doesn't think Iran would "disappear" her father right now, like what allegedly happened to a fellow Evin prisoner this week, but worries that his contact with the outside world, currently via limited calls within Iran, could be cut off by the prison. Reza had previously gone on hunger strikes to protest the arrests of political prisoners and the conditions at Evin prison, the same jail where British-Iranian mother Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe was held. Mehraveh said there is a bedbug infestation and a general lack of hygiene. "My father is also struggling with health issues, and his hospital transfer appointments have been cancelled repeatedly at the last minute because my father refuses to be handcuffed and wear the prison uniform," Mehraveh said.
Yahoo
2 days ago
- Politics
- Yahoo
'Terrified': Supporters fear for prisoners trapped in Iran
As Israel presses its aerial attacks on Tehran, concern is growing over the fate of foreign nationals and Iranians seen by rights groups as political prisoners imprisoned in the capital who have no chance of fleeing to safety. Iran is believed to hold around 20 European nationals, many of whose cases have never been published, in what some Western governments describe as a strategy of hostage-taking aimed at extracting concessions from the West. Rights groups also accuse Iran of holding dozens of political prisoners whose sole offence has been to criticise the Islamic republic's clerical leadership. Most are held in Evin prison, a large, heavily fortified complex notorious among activists for rights abuses that is located in a northern district of the Iranian capital. The prisoners have no means to respond to US President Donald Trump's warning that "everyone should immediately evacuate Tehran!" For Noemie Kohler, the sister of French national Cecile Kohler, who has been held along with her partner Jacques Paris since May 2022 on espionage charges their families reject, the wait is agonising. "Since May 30, we've had no news, no sign of life from Jacques and Cecile, and the French authorities haven't been able to obtain any information either," Noemie Kohler told AFP, referring to the date of their last consular visit. "We saw that at least two strikes took place about two kilometres from where they are being held (in Evin prison), so it's extremely close. We suspect they must have heard the explosions, but we have no idea how they are doing, we have no idea what level of information they have access to." - 'Imminent danger' - Their last phone contact was on May 28, when Cecile Kohler's parents spoke to her, she said, describing the mood even then as "desperate", as they "no longer believe that they are going to be released". "We don't know if conditions in the prison have deteriorated in connection with the situation. We're completely in the dark, and we're truly terrified," she said. She called for the couple's "humanitarian exfiltration", warning that "they are in imminent danger of death". French Foreign Minister Jean-Noel Barrot said in May that 20 Europeans -- a higher number than the total of publicised cases -- are held in similar circumstances in Iran, including "teachers, academics, journalists, tourists". He told parliament on Wednesday that France sent messages to the Iranian and Israeli authorities "alerting them to the presence of our two compatriots in Evin prison and to the need, as far as the Iranian authorities are concerned, to release them without delay to ensure their safety". Among other Europeans known to be held in Iran is Iranian-Swedish academic Ahmadreza Djalali, who was arrested during a visit in April 2016 and sentenced to death in 2017 on charges of spying for Israel, which his family says are false. The current conflict, which has already seen one man, Esmail Fekri, executed on Monday on charges of spying for Israel, has made Djalali's situation especially precarious. Norway-based group Iran Human Rights has warned the lives of Djalali and eight other men convicted on similar charges are at risk. "The risk of execution of these individuals is serious," said its director Mahmood Amiry-Moghaddam, adding they had all been sentenced after "an unfair, non-transparent process, and based on the orders of security institutions". - 'My dad is in prison' - Tehran residents have fled the city en masse. The 2023 Nobel Peace Prize winner Narges Mohammadi, who was serving a prison sentence but was released from Evin last year on medical leave, said she had left Tehran. But Mohammadi's fellow rights activist Reza Khandan, the husband of prize-winning rights lawyer Nasrin Sotoudeh, is still jailed in Evin. Khandan, who long campaigned for his wife while she was in jail, was himself arrested in December 2024. "My dad is in prison. Can you tell me, how can my father evacuate Tehran?" their daughter Mehraveh Khandan said in a tearful message on Instagram. The New York-based Center for Human Rights in Iran urged "all parties to fully comply with international humanitarian law and take immediate steps to safeguard civilians, including those in custody". It published a letter by legal activist Mahvash Seydal, seen as a political prisoner by rights groups, calling on authorities to grant detainees such as herself temporary release "to protect the lives and dignity of political prisoners". pau-sjw/ah/jhb
Globe and Mail
03-06-2025
- General
- Globe and Mail
Diplomacy that fails to address Iran's human-rights violations is hardly diplomacy at all
Irwin Cotler is the international chair of the Raoul Wallenberg Centre for Human Rights, Canadian former minister of justice and attorney-general, and international legal counsel to Ahmadreza Djalali. Judith Abitan is the executive director of the Raoul Wallenberg Centre for Human Rights and a fellow of Harvard University's Carr Center for Human Rights Policy and Weatherhead Center for International Affairs Scholars program. On April 25, 2016, Ahmadreza Djalali, a Swedish-Iranian disaster-medicine expert, was arrested by the Islamic Republic of Iran's Ministry of Intelligence. Despite being invited by the University of Tehran, he was arbitrarily detained and subjected to months of interrogation in solitary confinement at Evin Prison's Ward 209, and then sentenced to death for 'corruption on earth' following a sham trial based on coerced confessions of espionage extracted under torture. Iranian state media has relentlessly spread falsehoods, portraying Dr. Djalali as a threat to the state and enemy of the people. These slanders have been exploited against him while traumatizing his family in Sweden, exemplifying the intersection of domestic oppression and transnational repression. Dr. Djalali's wife and children – 13 and 4 when he was taken – have been forced to spend a significant part of their lives away from him. He continues to suffer from debilitating physical and mental health issues due to prolonged detention, denial of access to family, medical care and consular protection – conditions that amount to torture and other cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment. Dr. Djalali's arbitrary detention not only violates Iran's international humanitarian obligations under relevant treaties and conventions, it breaches Iran's own civil, criminal, constitutional and Sharia laws. The Iranian Constitution guarantees fair trial rights, including the right to select legal representation, presumption of innocence and protection against unlawful detention – all of which have been violated in his case and in the cases of thousands of other documented detainees. Yet as we write, the United States is negotiating a new nuclear deal with Tehran. There is no indication that Iran's human-rights violations will be raised as part of a potential deal; its persecution and prosecution of political prisoners, as well as 'the harms inherent in hostage-taking – most notably torture," which the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture has characterized as 'a crime against humanity when committed as part of a widespread or systematic attack against a civilian population with knowledge of the attack' – have yet to be redressed. It is imperative that the negotiations confront Iran's sevenfold threat to international peace and security, its brutal crackdown on dissent, systemic repression of women, persecution of minorities, censorship of expression, violent suppression of protests, torture in prisons and weaponization of the judiciary. Indeed, any diplomatic engagement that ignores these calculated and sustained attacks on human dignity is not diplomacy – it is complicity. Inaction only serves to stain the world's liberal democracies. The Swedish government's unassertive action on Dr. Djalali's behalf risks undermining its principles of equality before the law, as seen in other emblematic cases involving detained Swedish citizens such as playwright and journalist Dawit Isaak, who has been jailed in Eritrea for more than two decades, and publisher Gui Minhai, who has been in custody in China since 2015. Dr. Djalali's exclusion from a prisoner swap last year raises concerns that Sweden has de facto abandoned him, even though diplomatic remedy is an international obligation, not a matter of national discretion. In his own words, '3,288 days of suffering and being under risk of execution show the inefficacy of words and condemnation. Termination of my torture-like conditions needs a real and joint action by the EU and Swedish officials. Otherwise, if I die here, either due to execution or illness, the officials who were careless and neutral about my situation over all these years and left me behind when able to return me home, are also responsible in my death.' Time is of the essence. In the first 25 days of May, at least 113 people were executed in Iran, averaging four per day, and on May 28, Iranian dissident Pedram Madani was executed. This is not just a travesty of justice; this is state-sanctioned extrajudicial killing. As Dr. Djalali's health rapidly declines, the international community must act quickly to secure his release. Canada is well-placed to lead this effort by making the appropriate representations to the UN Human Rights Council, invoking the Declaration Against Arbitrary Detention in State-to-State Relations and requesting immediate medical furlough. The Community of Democracies should join France in initiating legal action against Iran at the International Court of Justice, using Dr. Djalali's case to highlight a broader pattern of arbitrary detention, executions and violations of consular rights. Iran's mistreatment of Dr. Djalali is not only an affront to Sweden but a crime against all member states. Now, justice must be served without delay.
The National
25-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The National
Iran spars with France over dissident filmmaker's Cannes triumph
Iran hit out at France on Sunday for praising a dissident filmmaker whose tale of revenge against the Iranian state triumphed at the Cannes Film Festival. Jafar Panahi, a former prisoner in Iran, won the top prize in Cannes – the Palme d'Or – for his film It Was Just an Accident, which depicts five Iranians confronting a man they believed tortured them in jail. French Foreign Minister Jean-Noel Barrot praised the film as a "gesture of resistance against the Iranian regime's oppression". Tehran is under widespread sanctions for cracking down on dissent, most notably after anti-regime protests that followed the 2022 death of a young woman, Mahsa Amini, in police custody. That led to Iran's Foreign Ministry summoning France's top diplomat in Tehran on Sunday, state news agency IRNA reported. "Following the insulting remarks and unfounded allegations by the French Minister..., the charge d'affaires of that country in Tehran has been summoned to the ministry," it said. The state news agency had previously hailed Panahi's victory as having "made history for Iranian cinema", without delving into the film's contents. It was the first Iranian win in the Palme d'Or since Abbas Kiarostami received the honour for Taste of Cherry in 1997. Panahi, 64, was detained in Tehran's Evin prison for almost seven months on charges of spreading anti-government propaganda. He was released in 2023 two days after beginning a hunger strike. Panahi won a Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival in 2000 for his filmThe Circle. In 2015, he won the Golden Bear in Berlin forTaxi Tehran, and in 2018, he won the Best Screenplay prize at Cannes forThree Faces. His latest film depicts an Iranian torture victim who believes he has encountered Peg Leg, a one-legged state interrogator responsible for mistreating him and many others. The National's film review described it as a production that "rages against the Iranian state".
