Iran: Press freedom violations recounted in real time January 2022

25.02.2022 – Two jailed women journalists granted medical furloughs

Reporters Without Borders (RSF) is relieved to learn that two women journalists, Narges Mohammadi and Alieh Motalebzadeh, have been granted medical furloughs from Qarchak women’s prison, but it reiterates its call for their immediate release.

Mohammadi, who is also a human rights defender, was taken from the notorious prison to a Tehran hospital with respiratory and heart problems on 18 February and underwent surgery for a blocked coronary artery. She was returned to Qarchak after the operation but, according to her husband, Taghi Rahmani, the judicial and prison authorities finally granted her a medical furlough on 20 February.

Motalebzadeh’s husband, Sadra Abdollahi, reported in a tweet on 23 February that his wife has been granted a medical furlough after testing positive for Covid-19. This is the second time that this photo-journalist has caught the virus in less than 18 months. Mohammadi and Motalebzadeh were transferred in January to Qarchak, located in Varamin, an outlying suburb on the south side of the capital, from Evin prison in one of the city’s northern suburbs.

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24.02.2022 - Under house arrest for 11 years

Mehdi Karoubi, a former parliamentary speaker and owner of the closed newspaper Etemad Melli, now aged 84, Mir Hossein Mousavi, the owner of the closed newspaper Kalameh Sabaz, now aged 80, and Mousavi’s wife, the writer Zahra Rahnavard, now aged 76, complete their 11th year under house arrest today.

Reporters Without Borders (RSF) points out that their detention has no legal basis under Iranian law, flouts international standards and is a flagrant violation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights as they are being denied the right to a fair trial.

After saying nothing for ten days, the authorities confirmed on 24 February 2011 that Karoubi, Mousavi and Rahnavard had been placed under house arrest in Tehran. Leaders of the protest movement against President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s disputed reelection in June 2009, they were branded by the regime as “heads of sedition.” They have all been hospitalised several times since 2011, in some cases with heart problems linked to the conditions in which they are being held and their inability to move about the city.

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22.02.2022 - Two journalists arrested

Reporters Without Borders (RSF) condemns the unrelenting crackdown on press freedom in Iran, in which two more journalists were arrested at opposite ends of the country on 13 February.

One was Rozbeh Priri, a citizen-journalist and translator, who was arrested by plainclothesmen in Tabriz, the capital of northwestern Iran’s East Azerbaijan province, and was taken to the city’s main prison. Relatives say he was detained to begin serving the three-year jail sentence he received from a Tabriz court on 12 May 2021. The court, which also fined him 5 million tomans (1,500 euros), imposed the sentence in response to a Revolutionary Guard complaint accusing him of “false information” in his Instagram description of the beating his brother received when arrested and jailed in March 2021. A civil society activist who was arrested while distributing Azeri-language books, his brother was hospitalised for ten days as a result of the beating.

The other was Iraj Moghadam, the editor of the Hezar Pisheh news website, who was arrested under a warrant issued by a court in Chavar, a town in the southwestern province of Ilam, in response to the complaint brought against him by a local state-owned petrochemical company because he published a copy of the payslip of one of the company’s directors as evidence of how much he was being paid.

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Press freedom violations recounted in real time (January -December 2021)

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Press freedom violations recounted in real time (January -December 2020)

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Press freedom violations recounted in real time (January -December 2019)

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Press freedom violations recounted in real time (January -December 2018)

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Press freedom violations recounted in real time (January -December 2017)

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Press freedom violations recounted in real time (January -December 2016)

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Press freedom violations recounted in real time (January -December 2015)

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Press freedom violations recounted in real time ( January-December 2014)

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Press freedom violations recounted in real time ( January-December 2013)

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Press freedom violations recounted in real time (January-December 2012)

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Press freedom violations recounted in real time (January-December 2011)

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Press freedom violations recounted in real time (July-December 2010)

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Press freedom violations recounted in real time (January-July 2010)

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Press freedom violations recounted in real time (June-December 2009)