The families of Majid Tavakoli, Ahmad Ghasaban, and Ehsan Mansoori, the three students who have been arrested a year ago, wrote a complain letter to the chief of highest court and explained that despite of the 80 million bail, the authorities are denying their children release.
In their letter they asked for justice for their children and the law to be applied in their case. Before hand the families have written many letters to authorities and explained their children’s situation, but didn’t get any answer back. All of these are happening while the family contacted the head of justice department in Tehran, Alireza Avaee, has promised to follow up their case and resolve their problem. But there has not been any action taken place.
The families are upset and overwhelmed and are confused about what to do about their children situation. They know the accusation is false and the court dismissed the charges against the students but a year later they are still in jail. They voice their frustration in the letter saying that there is no authority figure to respond to them and they don’t know what to do.
What we have said here is only a brief listing of academic violations and denial of right to education in Iranian universities today. Students are determined to continue their legal and rightful struggle to promote independence of universities and uphold academic freedoms, although many are sacrificed down this path.
Iran is a state party to both the International Convention on Civil and Political Rights (without reservation) and the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC), both of which prohibit the execution of persons under the age of 18 at the time of their offense. In ratifying the CRC, Iran declared an extremely broad reservation, “not to apply any provisions or articles of the Convention that are incompatible with Islamic Laws.”
one must not forget that one aspect of “security” cases is the image that they carry for the groups that advance such issues. Therefore, before fake charges take to the news-media and become public, those who have had a hand in arresting the students must be weakened. Otherwise, after the severe charges are made public, repeated and are tied to the image of the actors, even the intervention of the head of the judiciary (as history demonstrates) cannot be of much help to the detainees.
How can we tell the judiciary officials of Iran that according to law juveniles can stay alive and continue to live with appropriate and suitable punishment? How must one make this request from the judiciary a public and wide-spread demand and point out that killing a juvenile who has not wholeheartedly committed an act does not solve any of the real problems facing the country?
Thousands of university students in an Iranian city have held a protest against the attempted sexual harassment of a female colleague by a top university official, the press reported on Monday. About 3,000 students at the university in the northwestern city of Zanjan staged the sit-in protest over the weekend at a sports hall on campus, the reports said.
