Teaching Comparative Government and Politics

Monday, February 25, 2013

Then keep opposition leaders in jail (at home)

Last week, Iran jailed journalists who were suspected of intending to report on politics. Of course, they've keep the losing presidential candidates locked up in their homes for a long time.

Call for Iran to end house arrest of opposition leaders

Six leading human rights organisations have called on Iran to the end the "arbitrary" house arrest of opposition leaders Mir Hossein Mousavi and Mehdi Karroubi, who have been cut off from the outside world for nearly two years without being put on trial.

"For two years now Iranian officials have stripped these opposition figures of their most basic rights without any legal justification or any effective means of remedy," the Iranian Nobel peace prize laureate, Shirin Ebadi, said in a joint appeal signed by Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, International Campaign for Human Rights in Iran, International Federation for Human Rights, League for the Defence of Human Rights in Iran, and Reporters Without Borders.

Mousavi and Karroubi

In mid-February 2011, following calls for street protests in solidarity with the pro-democracy movements in Egypt and Tunisia, dubbed the Arab spring, Iranian authorities placed Mousavi and Karroubi, along with their wives, Zahra Rahnavard and Fatemeh Karroubi, under house arrest…

The Islamic republic has so far refused to put the men on trial and the decision behind the house arrests is believed to have come from the very top, Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei…

Mohammad Taghi Karroubi, one of Karorubi's sons who is currently living in exile in London, told the Guardian that for the last 18 months his father had been made to live in an apartment alone, at one point being denied family visits. "It's solitary confinement. These days he's allowed to visit family members once a week but there was a time we had no contact with him for over four months."…

Iran is due to hold its next presidential vote in June. Five months out, the authorities have escalated the crackdown on the press, arresting a number of journalists and forbidding any mention of an election boycott…