Over 250 activists in the civil, political, student and women’s fields have issued a public statement in which they have protested the death sentences issued for three Kurdish activists Farzad Kamangir, Farhad Vakili and Ali Heydarian, while also condemning the tortures that they have been subjected to in prison, calling on officials to rescind the judgments.
Recently, a revolutionary court in Iran sentenced these three activists who had been in prison for 17 months to be executed on chares of “acting against state security” and being a “mohareb” (loosely translated as “at war with God”).
The signatories of the statement also made reference to acts of torture that the detainees had been subjected to and stressed their concern for the physical and mental health of the victims.
According to the announcement the revolutionary court made its decisions after a trial that lasted less than 10 minutes. The Kurds had been held in prison in Sanandaj, Kermanshah and Evin where they had been interrogated and violently mistreated. Farzad Kamangar had been recently active in civil issues and worked with human rights NGOs including the Kurdish organization for the defense of human rights. He is reported to have been very harshly tortured in the security detention centers where he had been subjected to electric shock and other physical abuse as his body indicated, something that had been confirmed by witnesses.
Kamangar had been held in solitary confinement for over 8 months while being completely deprived of any visitations rights. He had also spent time in another notorious prison known in Rajai Shahr. He is reported to have been particularly victimized in an effort to force him to make fake self incriminating confessions, while he refuted the allegations to his attorney.
While condemning any form of torture, the statement stressed that these acts were completely contrary to law and human standards. In the statement, the signatories also declared that they considered the sentences against the three Kurds to be completely unfair and ask the Iranian judiciary to annul these sentences and initiate independent investigations over the tortures committed on Farzad Kamangir.
Rooz
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?
it is easy to predict that the success of student activists in imposing their will and demands on government officials at academic institutions, such as the Teachers Training college and Zanjan University (where the students boldly took the initiative into their own hands), would result in a backlash by extreme right-wing officials who would plan an “instructive” counter-attack against the student movement.Hopefully such a reaction will not come. But from an analytic perspective, one must not negate it altogether.
This is the reason that the moment imprisoned students step out of prison, it becomes clear to every one why they were put behind bars: for simply criticizing the president. It becomes instantly clear why they were subjected to interrogations and what questions were asked of them. These are the events that portray the image of this country. Students, social activists and journalists are certainly not on the list of those that dent this image. The publication of the arrest of students because of their criticism of the president brings forth a caricature image of Mahmud Ahmadinejad which does not match the claims that he made at Columbia University or the image that the regime strives to present about its standing.
There are at least 70 young people on death row who at the time of their arrest were under the age of 16. In the past 12 months, Iranian organisations claim that 80 feminists have been arrested and 20 of them have been sentenced from three to five years in jail. A total of 54 journalists have ended up in prison, several were released without trial after serving jail time, while others remain behind bars. In the past 12 months, 34 newspapers and magazines, among them the feminist magazine Zanan, have been shut down.
