THOUSANDS ILLEGALLY DETAINED IN IRAN AMIDST PROTESTS
Just two weeks after the mass protests that rocked 130 cities across Iran ended, sources say, the rallies are back for round two but thousands of protesters remain illegally detained. The protests commenced on January 29 in Gorgan, the capital of Iran’s Golestan province. Thousands of protesters were videoed chanting, “Death to dictator” while they marched through the downtown streets. The protests have since spread to several cities, including Kerman, Shiraz, Arak, Isfahan, and Rasht.
BERLIN (Reuters) – The German government’s human rights commissioner on Wednesday condemned Iran’s reported execution of a man who was 15 years old when he committed his crime, calling it a completely unacceptable violation of international law.
A prominent Iranian reformist who has been under house arrest for the past seven years has criticized Iran’s supreme leader, urging him to introduce and implement major reforms “before it is too late.”
Hundreds of members of the European Parliament have strongly condemned human rights violations by the Iranian government. According to Amnesty International, “Iran alone accounted for 55% of all recorded executions” in the world in 2016. They also called for the blacklisting of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) involved in multiple regional conflicts.
The Iranian authorities on Sunday released a woman who was arrested in the center of Tehran after she took off her headscarf in protest of the law enforcing women to wear headscarves in Iran her lawyer said,
“I am a professional Iranian singer but I am only allowed to work if I perform with a man, which is something I have never wanted to do,” female vocalist Sepideh Jandaghi told the Center for Human Rights in Iran (CHRI) in an interview.
Amnesty has called on the Iranian government to ‘immediately and unconditionally’ release a woman arrested for taking off her headscarf in public to protest the Islamic dress code enforced on women.
TIP CEO: With Europe’s Abdication, U.S. Must Take Lead in
When Federica Mogherini, the EU’s High Representative for Foreign Affairs finally spoke up about the protests that have recently roiled Iran, she didn’t speak up for freedom and demand that the government respect the rights of the protesters, but rather, she offered a non-judgmental “we expect all concerned to refrain from violence,” after the government had already killed at least 22 people.
A lawyer representing the families of two detainees who died in custody in Iran after being arrested during protests that erupted across the country in December 2017 is concerned about the fate of current detainees.
TEHRAN — At 25 percent, the interest rate paid on a savings account at the Caspian Finance and Credit Institution in Tehran was a better return than Mehrdad Asgari could earn investing in his own business renting out construction equipment. So in December 2016, he jumped at the chance, depositing $42,000 in a savings account.
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