The men are now held in Karoun prison in the city of Ahwaz, Khuzestan province, Amnesty reported. At least four of them were denied access to a lawyer for at least eight months after arrest.

Earlier this year, they were all charged in separate “five-minute court sessions with the vaguely-worded offences of ‘enmity against God and corruption on earth’, ‘gathering and colluding against state security’ and ‘spreading propaganda against the system’,” according to Amnesty report.

The charge of “enmity against God and corruption on earth” carries a possible death sentence. They are due to be put on trial on May 20.

According to Amnesty report, the six detainees are Mohammad Ali Amouri, blogger; Rahman Asakereh, teacher; Hashem Sha’bani Amouri, teacher; Hadi Rashidi, teacher; Sayed Jaber Alboshoka and his younger brother Sayed Mokhtar Alboshoka.

Jailed Iranian human rights activist Nargess Mohammadi has been transferred to Zanjan Prison.

The Melli-Mazhabi website reports that Mohammadi, the deputy head of the Centre for Human Rights Defenders of Iran, was transferred to Zanjan Prison from the Evin Prison infirmary in Tehran.

Taghi Rahmani, another Iranian activist who is currently abroad, reported this transfer, saying: “In view of the dire situation of provincial prisons, this transfer is a continuation of the harassment approach the authorities have taken with regard to Nargess Mohammadi.”

Mohammadi was visited by her family on Tuesday May 8. She is reportedly being interrogated regarding unspecified new charges that have not been communicated to her lawyer.

Mohammadi had been taken to Evin infirmary a few days earlier for serious health complications. Mohammadi was arrested after the controversial 2009 presidential elections, when human rights activists became a chief target of the government’s crackdown.

She is charged with “assembly and collusion against national security, membership in the Centre for Human Rights Defenders of Iran and propaganda activities against the Islamic Republic regime.”

Shirin Ebadi, Iran’s Nobel Peace laureate and a founding member of the Centre for Human Rights Defenders, has written to the United Nations High Commissioner of Human Rights, Navi Pillay, urging her to use all of her influence to get Mohammadi out of prison.

A student group active in defending the rights of those students who are denied higher education has criticized the policies of Iran’s minister of science research and technology Kamran Daneshjoo and declared that Ahmadinejad’s administration is pursuing a second cultural revolution by practicing “educational apartheid.”

In its report, Shoraye Defa az Haghe Tahsil (Council on the Defense of Education Rights) reminds that the practice of educational policies that deny people the right to attend institutions of higher education, particularly during the last three years, has increased and hundreds of students have been denied access to education through the decrees issued by the disciplinary committees of universities and the central disciplinary committee at the ministry of science, and also through the “illegal” practice of marking students with stars at the national entrance exams for Master’s programs. Under the star program, a student who is deemed to be unfit to pursue higher education because of his political views or actions, is given one a number of stars by university authorities who monitor students with assistance from security and law enforcement agencies. The higher the number of stars the more likely that a student will be denied full or some access to higher education.

Through the many years that Daneshjoo has been the minister of science, he has been often spoken of measures to Islamicize universities, segregate them by sex, prevent dissident students from pursuing their education, and, dismiss and pre-maturely retire professors. These programs have been called “planned and indicative of the administration’s determination to continue to violate existing laws and deny students their rightful rights” by a student who has been deprived of pursuing his higher education.

Continuation and Deeping of Destructive Policies

In one of his recent statements, the minister of education said, “the activists of the sedition movement, its leaders and those who insist on their wrong views” have no right to admission in universities. According to IRNA official news agency, speaking at the an event at Shahrood University on April 27, Daneshjoo said, “Individuals who have lost their path after the 2009 sedition and following the wise comments of the esteemed supreme leader insist on their path, have no place at universities. Our society and population does not allow us and we shall not commit treason.” Sedition is the term Iranian authorities use for the massive protests that were organized or supported by the Green Movement after the 2009 presidential elections were announced which re-instated Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as president. They assert that the elections were rigged.

This statement by the minister brought forth strong condemnations and criticism from student organizations across the country. In the most recent response, the Council on the Defense of Education Rights presented a detailed report and called the remarks “criminal.”

In March/April too Daneshjoo repeated this message in Qom. Daftare Tahkim Vahdat, the principal student organization in the country condemned those remarks and said they “revealed the express violation of student rights.”

A student interviewed by Rooz, who has been denied the right to pursue his education said that the timing of these remarks by Daneshjoo was important as they come two or three weeks before the announcement of the results of the national entrance exams to universities’ Master’s programs and “increase concerns about greater restrictions to higher education.”

He also said that the recent expulsion of professors such as Alireza Beheshti, Ghorban Behzadinejad and Mohsen Mirdamadi were not unrelated to these remarks. “It appears that Kamran Daneshjoo intends to create the atmosphere of a cemetery in the universities and through the support and guidance from hardline institutions wants to implement the second cultural revolution,” he said.

The cultural revolution of the Islamic republic, which is officially referred to as the “awakening of the Islamization of universities,” took place in the early years of the revolution and refers to educational initiatives which resulted in the dismissal and purging of many professors and students from institutions of higher education.

In its report on the education bans pursued and implemented during Ahmadinejad’s administration, the Council on the Defense of Education Rights writes that the “apartheid educational policies, particularly in the last three years, have gained momentum in the country and hundreds of students have been barred from pursuing their higher education goals.” The report also criticized the “star marking of students” program through which students are deprived from continuing their education because of their political views or actions. In addition to being deprived of pursuing their educational aspirations, many “starred” students have also been arrested, interrogated and imprisoned, particularly after the 2009 presidential elections and in the course of the nationwide protests to that election results. Among this latter group are Majid Dari, Zia Nabavi and Mehdie Golroo who are now serving time in prison. Some students were also arrested and “starred” because of their protests to Ahmadinejad’s televised debates during the 2009 presidential campaigns. Other students who remain behind bars are Saeed Jalalifar, Majid Tavakoli, Emad Bahavar, Eftekhar Bozorgian, Kaveh Rezai, Arash Sadeghi, Ali Akbar Mohammadzadeh, Moin Ghamin and Ali Ajami.

Darshan-Leitner said that Iran supports the Islamic Jihad movement financially while Syria had granted the group a haven to train in its territory.

U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth said in the Monday ruling: “When a state chooses to uses terror as a policy tool — as Iran and Syria continue to do — that state forfeits its sovereign immunity and deserves unadorned condemnation. Barbaric acts like the April 17, 2006 suicide bombing have no place in civilized society and present a moral depravity that knows no bounds.”

An American lawyer representing Syria argued the case should be dismissed on the grounds of “sovereign immunity” but the court dismissed it.

Darshan-Leitner said there is a good chance for the victim’s family to get compensation through frozen Syrian assets held by the U.S.

“For the first time an American court is holding the government of Syria accountable for its decades-long support of terrorism,” she said.

by: Michele Catanzaro

Omid Kokabee, an Iranian graduate student who has been imprisoned in Tehran for the past 15 months, was sentenced to 10 years on Sunday for allegedly conspiring with foreign countries against Iran.

Judge Abolghasem Salavati of Branch 15 of Tehran’s Revolution Court — who is famous for his harsh sentences — tried 10 to 15 people in the same trial, under the collective charge of collaborating with Israel’s intelligence agency, Mossad.

Kokabee, a graduate student who previously worked on the physics of optics at the Institute of Photonic Sciences (ICFO) in Barcelona, Spain, and more recently at the University of Texas in Austin, was arrested in Tehran in February 2011 on charges of “communicating with a hostile government” and “illegal earnings” (see ‘A year in jail without trial for Iranian student accused of spying’).

Close contacts of Kokabee in Iran have lamented the fact that no proof was presented at the trial to justify the sentence. Whereas other prisoners in the group declared themselves guilty in a television broadcast on the evening before the trial, the physics student has consistently denied all charges and refused to speak in court. (Faces are obscured in the broadcast, but Kokabee may be the person who appears at 24 seconds in a blue shirt.) He plans to appeal the sentence, according to his contacts.

International concern

Since Nature first highlighted Kokabee’s case (see ‘Missing physicist may have been jailed in Iran’), various organizations have written to the Iranian authorities asserting his innocence and asking for a fair trial — including the Committee of Concerned Scientists, a human-rights group based in New York; the American Physical Society in College Park, Maryland; and a group of four international optics organizations. His case has been included as a cause for concern in the report of Ahmed Shaheed, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on human rights in Iran.

In an open letter written while in prison, Kokabee claimed that the authorities were trying to obtain his “collaboration” through threats to him and his family; in another, he insisted that he was not a political activist, something that his friends confirm. Kokabee’s friends speculate that his frequent trips to Iran — totalling four or five in 2010 — may have aroused the suspicions of the Iranian authorities.

“This will send chills through the Iranian higher-education system, particularly scholars and students who seek to enhance and expand their horizons abroad,” says Hadi Ghaemi, a physicist previously at City University in New York and director of the International Campaign for Human Rights in Iran, an association that has recently promoted aninitiative for imprisoned students.

Meanwhile, Majid Jamali Fashi, convicted in August last year of murdering nuclear scientist Massoud Ali-Mohammadi in Tehran in 2010 (see ‘Iranian academics fear more killings’), was executed this morning, according to the Iranian state news agency.

Source: iranhumanrights