Iran regime’s ‘reformist’ government continues human rights violations by suppressing dissident voices

Yesterday the website promoting freedom and choice of Iranian women, NCRI Women’s Committee, reported the mistreatment of a female French foreign ministry official.

Currently, at Iran’s notorious Evin prison in Northwestern Tehran, the report confirms that Ms. Nazak Afshar, who holds dual French-Iranian citizenship, ‘was arrested on March 12th, 2016, upon her arrival in Tehran where she had intended to visit her ailing mother.’

Reporting on Ms. Afshar’s well being, punishing interrogations are said to be causing the French foreign ministry employee to ‘black out’; also that ‘instead of taking her to the hospital the agents resumed the interrogations every time she came to.’

The International Campaign for Human Rights in Iran are tracking the case reporting that ‘Afshar has been transferred from the women’s ward to Section 2A of the prison, which is under the supervision of the Revolutionary Guards.’

Raising public awareness of Ms. Afshar’s mistreatment also pulls focus on the regime’s record on human rights’ violations and suppression of women’s freedoms to travel. On Monday the well-known German-Iranian artist Parastou Forouhar commented on this.

In 2009 the artist was detained by the regime and not allowed to return to Germany for a number of weeks. In his report, published by the German organization Qantara – “qantara” means “bridge”, the artist talks about her unease with a regime that claims to be ‘reformist’.

Forouhar had recently returned to Iran to tend to burglaries that happened in her parents’ home where they (Parvaneh Eskandari and Daryoush Forouhar) were brutally executed by the secret service in November 1998.

Through anecdote about ‘an enthusiastic young man [who] pressed a campaign flyer into [her] hand,’ the candidate’s name, Forouhar remarks was of ‘ex-secret-service minister Dori Najafabadi’ with the reformist’s “Coalition of Hope 30+16”. The same man who had ‘ordered the murder of [her] parents’ years before.

Saddened also by seeing a young man duped who ‘spoke of his hope for reform, our right to vote, the national duty to make use of this vote.’

Before going back to Germany, a gallerist and printers who Forouhar had engaged were issued with summons and interrogated; with ‘a ban placed on the event.’ The show was to display ‘suicide scenes of women in idyllic, domestic and miniature-like surroundings; at once depicting and masking the contents.’

The gallery was forced to ‘announce the cancellation of the event;’ and upon spotting the news via the gallerist’s site, a journalist called Forouhar.

When the artist ‘informed the journalist who was from a critical newspaper close to the reformists’ about the ‘ban’, the journalist ‘expressed her regret and said goodbye.’

The ‘critical press are allowed to report on permitted activities, they [certainly] don’t mention bans.’