Female political prisoner writes letter about prison conditions and human rights violations

Detained human rights activist, Golrokh Iraie, who is detained in the Women’s Section in Evin Prison, wrote a letter about the non-independence and bias of the Prisons Organization and the inhumane treatment of political prisoners.
Her letter reads in part:
“As none of the officials in the Islamic Republic work according to their positions in the government, prison authorities also step beyond their specified boundaries…
We witness heads of prisons, continuously going into political prisoners’ dossiers, trying to disturb political activists in various ways, instead of attending to the affairs of the prison and prisoners.
The head of Evin Prison is not excluded from this practice. He is known by the name, Chaharmahali, and stands against political prisoners’ beliefs with aggressive measures…
My husband Arash Sadeqi is the victim of Evin Prison authorities’ hostility. He was transferred to another prisoner because he wasn’t willing to bow down and give in to their requests.
Section 350 and the Women’s Section of Evin Prison are located next to each other. It’s been a month since they’ve started harassing the prisoners of Section 350 in various ways trying to eventually force them to peacefully transfer…
They have announced in Section 350 that prisoners should be ready to be transferred to the quarantine in Section 4 of Evin. The conditions there are very bad without any open area…
The level of hegemonic power prison authorities wield and their hostility towards political prisoners is such that generally medical records sent from the hospital containing political prisoners’ medical histories are erased from their files after a short period of time. If families don’t succeed in receiving specific documents from the hospital, prison authorities deny the prisoner’s illness and prevent any further medical treatment.
Since the imposing of sanctions, which has led to the Prisons Organization’s budget cuts, they have put it up to the prisoners to provide their financial shortages. Instead of meeting the requirements of various sections, whether ordinary or political, they only say, ‘we have no budget’”.
Human rights activist Golrokh Ebrahimi Iraie is the wife of detained political prisoner Arash Sadeghi. She was arrested on September 13, 2014. Then in April of 2015, she was sentenced to 6 years of prison for blasphemy and spreading propaganda against the government. She is currently serving her sentence in the Women’s Section in Evin Prison.

The Truth About Iran's Evin Prison

Heshmat Alavi

Two months have passed since the May presidential “elections” in Iran that saw the incumbent Hassan Rouhani reach a second term. The pro-Iran appeasement camp in the West went the distance to raise hopes over the hoax of Rouhani rendering major reforms.

These voices somehow described Rouhani as a “reformist” and completely neglected the over 3,000 executions during his first term as president. Reports from across the country are turning out to be very disturbing, signaling more troubling times to come in reference to human rights violations.

As fellow Forbes contributor Ellen R. Wald reported, “On July 16, news came out that an American graduate student at Princeton University named Xiyue Wang had been sentenced to 10 years in an Iranian prison for ‘espionage.’”

This is Iran again resorting to old tactics of taking Westerners as hostage, mainly dual citizens, to be used as bargaining chips in advancing objectives and politics in negotiations with interlocutors.

Another practice the regime in Tehran will continue is sending scores to the gallows. The Iranian opposition National Council of Resistance of Iran issued a report recently indicating 57 individuals have been executed across Iran in the beginning of July alone.

Reports from inside Iran also indicate nearly 120 inmates held in a prison west of Tehran are on the verge of execution. These hangings are planned for the next few weeks, their families say citing authorities, and the sentences of at least 13 individuals are to be implemented soon.

These alarming reports have all arrived only after a recent tour launched by the mullahs for dozens of foreign ambassadors to visit the notorious Evin Prison located in the hilltops of northern Tehran.

But of course, no human rights organization or international prison expert were invited, only selected areas of the prison were shown, and merely hand-picked images were provided to the media to depict a highly peaceful environment and go against any claims of rights violations.

Iran Acknowledges Massacre of Political Prisoners

From:LGF

Iran Acknowledges Massacre of Political Prisoners

By: Keyvan Salami

It is not easy to keep silent when the silence is a lie.”
Victor Hugo - Les Miserables
For three decades Iran lied about the massacre of 30,000 political prisoners in summer of 1988, and kept silent about this atrocity. But in this year’s presidential election as conservative cleric Ebrahim Raisie, one of the perpetrators of the massacre, was selected as one of the main candidates, the issue surfaced, forcing regime officials, one after another, to confess about the carnage.
“Executions in 1988 were fair and legal…[Iranian regime founder Ruhollah] Khomeini carried out a measure no other clergy was able to throughout history …Khomeini was decisive and had no reservations over God’s will, and God’s will was that all enemies of God must be executed…Imam (Khomeini) did not pay any attention to the West’s human rights claims… At the time 80 to 90 percent of high school and university students supported opposition groups. We started the trails and after convicting them, in a period of two to three months the card was turned around… my friends and I, all together we were 20 judges in the country, and we carried out something that guaranteed the security of the country for that year and the years to come, so the MEK can never rise again, because in a period that they were getting strong we suffocated them.” said Mullah Ali Razini, prosecutor of branch 41 of Iran’s Supreme Court, about the 1988 massacre in his July 2nd interview with the semi-official Tasnim news agency.
In the summer of 1988 Khomeini issued a religious decree calling for the massacre.
“Whoever at any stage continues to belong to the [People’s Mojahedin Organization of Iran (PMOI/MEK)] must be executed. Annihilate the enemies of Islam immediately!…Those who are in prisons throughout the country and remain steadfast in their support for the MEK are waging war on God, and are condemned to execution…It is naive to show mercy to those who wage war on God,” reads part of the decree.
A committee of four men was formed to implement the order, and in a matter of few months over 30,000 political prisoners were executed, mostly members and supporters of the main opposition PMOI/MEK.
Last year the revelation of an audio tape and unpublished letters of the late Ayatollah Hossein-Ali Montazeri, former successor to Khomeini, shed light on new dimensions of this great crime. Pregnant women and girls as young as 14 and 15 years old were among those executed, Montazeri wrote.
“A full accounting of what’s called the “death commission” created by Khomeini has yet to be carried out. But thousands died — by hanging or firing squad or in places such as Tehran’s Evin prison,” according to a 1990 Amnesty International report.
The families of the victims had been imprisoned, tortured and suppressed not to ask about their loved ones.
“Prisoner of conscience Maryam Akbari Monfared has been threatened with an additional three-year prison term and exile to a remote prison. This was in reprisal for her open letters seeking truth and justice for her siblings who were extrajudicially executed in 1988. She has been held in Tehran’s Evin prison since 2009 serving a 15-year sentence,” Amnesty reported on 3 November 2016.
In another report in 2009, Amnesty called on “Iranian authorities to immediately stop the destruction of hundreds of individual and mass, unmarked graves in Khavaran, south Tehran, to ensure that the site is preserved and to initiate a forensic investigation at the site as part of a long-overdue, thorough, independent and impartial investigation into mass executions which began in 1988, often referred to in Iran as the ‘prison massacres’. The organization fears that these actions of the Iranian authorities are aimed at destroying evidence of human rights violations and depriving the families of the victims of the 1988 killings of their right to truth, justice and reparation.”
All we hear in the West is about Iran’s nuclear and missile programs, and their malignant actions in the neighboring countries. For far too long the West has turned a blind eye to Iran’s atrocious human rights violations.
Marking the 29th anniversary of this horrific purge, the time has come to hold the mullah’s regime accountable for crimes against hum