TEHRAN, May 20 - Iranian bloggers and activists on Tuesday condemned a move by a government panel to block access to several Web sites related to women’s issues and human rights.”It’s like a big attack,” said Parvin Ardalan, who works for http://www.change4equality.net, a Tehran-based feminist Web site affected by the new restrictions. “Now, most sites related to women’s and human rights issues have been blocked in one day,” she said.
Ardalan’s site is part of a campaign to collect 1 million signatures aimed at pressuring the government to change what activists call discriminatory laws against women. “The authorities want to silence us,” she said.
Web sites maintained by opposition groups, dissidents and even some supporters of the government have been blocked in the past. Iran also bars access to thousands of Web sites that show pornography.
The Ministry of Islamic Guidance and Culture’s supervisory board for the media notified Iranian Internet service providers Saturday about the new restrictions, which affected dozens of sites, according to a report Tuesday in Ettemaad-e Melli, a newspaper in Tehran that is often critical of the government.
The supervisory board answers to the Supreme Council of Cultural Revolution, which determines the country’s educational, scientific, cultural and social objectives. The 36-member council sets parameters for what is allowed on the Iranian Internet, but the board decides which sites should be blocked. It is unclear who sits on the board, although its members are thought to include representatives of the judiciary, the intelligence service and other government agencies.
The board has in the past effectively banned Web sites supportive of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Access to a blog by the wife of government spokesman Ghollam-Hossein Elham was restricted this year. Elham said that access was blocked because of his wife’s critical articles about Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, a former president and powerful anti-Ahmadinejad politician.
“The limits of the filtering are pornography and anti-revolutionary sites. This is illegal censorship,” Elham said to the Khorasan newspaper in April.
The blog is now accessible in Iran, but some other sites supportive of the government remain blocked.
“Newspaper censorship, social oppression and filtering are not logical unless you look at them as sub-parts of overall oppression,” said Asieh Amini, a journalist and activist in Tehran. Her blog, http://varesh.blogfa.com, has been blocked since Saturday.
From 1999 to 2005, Iran’s judiciary closed dozens of newly founded newspapers critical of the government, prompting many journalists to move to the Web.
In 2003, Iranian authorities started restricting access to Web sites, a technique which can be bypassed by filter breakers or other tools to avoid digital censorship. These programs are slow, and filtered Web sites lose many readers.
According to Iranian blogging services, last year there were more than 700,000 blogs in Farsi, many of which are written from abroad.
“It makes one really depressed to see his or her site being filtered, but it also shows that the authorities are afraid,” said Jadi Mirmirani, a human rights activist.
“It means: we do not tolerate any alternative news sources or any new ideas.”
Thomas Erdbrink
Washington Post Foreign Service
Wednesday, May 21, 2008
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.
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