H.E. UN Secretary-General
Mr. Ban Ki.Moon,
Excellency,
We greatly appreciate your appeal to the Iranian authorities in June 2009 for an immediate stop of the use of force against civilians and asking them to respect civil rights in dealing with protests following the presidential election.
One year later, seventeen Iranian political prisoners, currently being held at Tehran's notorious Evin prison, are on hunger strike under harsh physical conditions since Monday 26 July. That is while Majid Tavakoli, Keyvan Samimi and Bahman Ahmadi-Amouei have started a dry hunger strike on August 4.
Meanwhile, the families of these political prisoners have been banned from giving interviews and keeping track the condition of the prisoners, their family members.
Iranian prison officials placed the hunger strikers in solitary confinement last month and have prevented their families and outside observers from seeing or visiting them respectively. The hunger strikers are demanding their basic rights, which they have been denied. Their lives are now in grave danger. Reza Moini of Reporters Without Borders, notes that there are some 200 cases of journalists who were arrested in the past several years simply for criticizing the government.
Their harsh conditions have also raised protests from female prisoners in the public ward of Evin prison. The female prisoners, tellingly, have issued a letter calling for prison officials’ attention to the demands of the 17 prisoners and supporting the request to return them to the „normal confinement conditions and the public ward“.
Your Excellency, we would like to urge you to repeat your appeal to the Iranian authorities to respect human rights and send a delegation to Iran to investigate the situation of „political prisoners“, specially the case of the prisoners on hunger strike in order to save their lives.
The prisoners on hunger strike are: Ali Malihi, student activist and member of Daftar-e Tahkim Vahdat (student alumni organization), Bahman Ahmad Amouie, journalist, Hossein Nourinejad, journalist and member of the Participation Front (reformist party), Abdollah Momeni, student activist and spokesperson for Daftar-e Tahkim Vahdat, Ali Parviz, student activist, Hamid Reza Mohammadi, political activist, Jafar Eghdami, civil society activist, Babak Bordbar, photographer., Zia Nabavi, starred student and member of the Council to Defend the Right to Education, Ebrahim (Nader) Babaie, civil society activist and an injured veteran of the Iran-Iraq war, Kouhyar Goodarzi, human rights activist and blogger, Majid Dorri, student activist, Majid Tavakoli, student activist, Keyvan Samimi, journalist, Gholamhossein Arashi, arrested during an Ashura protest in Tehran, Payman Karimi, arrested during an Ashura protest in Tehran, Mohammad Hossein Sohrabi Rad.
We are grateful, your Excellency, to you and your honorable special officers and delegates for allowing us to convey our concerns.
Yours faithfully,
Dr. Ali Gouche
Dr. Jaleh Gohari
Prof. Dr. Siroos Mirzaei
Adresse:Postfach 20 A-1097 Wien
E.mail:
office@iran-scientists.net
www.iran-scientists.net
