IRAN: Tallying a human rights scorecard
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There have been several recent developments on the human rights front in Iran. Altogether, they show how tough it can be to figure out whether the situation for prisoners and dissidents in that country is getting better or worse.
First the good news: Iranian authorities in recent days released Emadeddin Baghi from Tehran’s Evin Prison, where he’s been held since October. Baghi is one of Iran’s most outspoken advocates for human rights, especially the rights of prisoners. He’s also a staunch opponent of the death penalty, which is frequently imposed in Iran. He was supposed to serve one year of a previously suspended sentence, but was let go for health reasons. He had been hospitalized three times in Evin.
Iran also recently lifted a travel ban on Mehrnoush Solouki, a French Iranian journalist banned from leaving the country after she was caught filming a cemetery where dissidents were buried. She has left Iran.
Now, here’s the bad news: An Iranian student in the custody of intelligence ministry officials in the western city of Sandanaj died early this month under mysterious circumstances. Authorities say Ebrahim Lotfallahi, 27, killed himself. His family isn’t buying it.
Neither is New York-based Human Rights Watch, which issued a press release calling for an investigation into the death of Lotfallahi as well as that of Zahra Bani Ameri, a 27-year-old doctor who died in custody last October. Authorities called her case a suicide too. Some see a pattern emerging.
“The sudden death in detention of two apparently healthy young people is extremely alarming,” Joe Stork, Middle East deputy director at Human Rights Watch, said in the press release. “The government only heightens our concern by quickly dismissing them as suicides.”
Lotfallahi, an ethnic Kurd, was said to be a student activist in some reports but also described as an aspiring lawyer and part-time social worker. He was arresed Jan. 6 and taken to a detention center in Sanandaj, the heartland of Kurdish culture and politics in Iran. His family does not know what charges, if any, were lodged against him.
On Jan. 15, prison officials called his parents and told them he had been buried in a local cemetery. Outraged family members have told Human Rights Watch that they wil demand authorities exhume the body and conduct a forensic examination.
‘Nobody has seen the body, [but] they said he’s there,’ Lotfallahi’s brother, Ismail, told Radio Farda, the U.S.-funded Farsi language news station. ‘A few days after they buried him there, they covered the grave with concrete.”
Sanandaj is a hotbed of support for Pjak, the militant Kurdish group based in northern Iraq. The militants have been fighting Iranian troops along the border for several years. Iran’s restive Kurdish population has been bristling under the hard-line rule of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
According to HRW, Bani Ameri was arrested Oct.12 after police found her and her fiancé in a public park in the city of Hamedan. They were charged with having an “illegal relationship.” The next day, prison officials told her family she had committed suicide in her cell. Iranian Nobel Prize winner and attorney Shirin Ebadi is pursuing information on her death.
— Borzou Daragahi in Beirut