Reporters Without Borders (RSF) condemns the appalling conditions in Iran’s Qarchak prison for women, to which two journalists were recently transferred, and calls for a strong and immediate reaction from the Office of the UN High Commission for Human Rights and the UN special rapporteur on the human rights situation in Iran.
Six years ago on New Year’s Day, an Iranian-Austrian IT businessman said goodbye to his wife and three children and boarded a flight from Vienna to Tehran via Istanbul. Kamran Ghaderi was due to return five to six days later, but instead, on 2 January 2016, he was arrested and has now spent six years in Evin prison in Tehran.
Two lawyers and a civil rights activist who were outspoken about Iran’s chaotic response to the pandemic and delays in its vaccine rollout are on trial now, charged with threatening national security.
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.
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.
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.
