TEHRAN, Iran - Hundreds of university students protested demanding the removal of an administrator they accuse of sexually harassing a female student in a northwest Iranian city, media reported Monday.
The protest at the university in Zanjan came after several students broke into the unnamed administrator’s office Saturday to stop him after hearing that he was harassing the young woman, the pro-reform newspaper Etemad reported.
The female student had been called to his office over a disciplinary hearing she was involved in, the paper said, without elaborating. According to the report, she fled when the students broke in and students took the administrator to university security.
Later on Saturday, several hundred students gathered in a university sports hall demanding the resignation of the official and members of the university’s board of directors, Etemad and the semi-official student news agency ISNA reported from Zanjan, 180 miles northwest of Tehran.
University president Alireza Nedaf addressed the protesters, thanking them for their vigilance and urging them to obey the law in their protests. He said the incident was under investigation, telling students, “If corruption takes place, we always desire the support of the students in eliminating any type of corruption.”
Iran’s universities are a center of political activity, with occasional protests despite heavy controls under hard-line President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. In December, several anti-government protests erupted at universities in Tehran over the arrests of student activists.
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.
