Original: English

He left Iran in the summer of 1995, but his wife, son, and daughter had left three years earlier than that (authorities had opened up a new file on him in the meantime, so he had to go into hiding during that time).

Mr. Nejabat had been in prison in the 80s, until 1988. His first sentence was a few-year sentence (, but was inexplicably extended for an extra two years. He was in Gohar Dashdt, Evin, and Adel Abad prisons throughout his time in detention.

He thought he would be executed in 1988, since he heard about other executions. But he was released.

His wife had also been in prison, and his son was born there. His son is a paraplegic due to heat damage to the brain from prison as a young child.

In 1992, a new file was opened against him. He fled the country.

At one point, a column in Keyhan was written against his current organization’s work abroad.

Mr. “Mani”

Student

Mr. “Mani” left Iran right before the 2009 election, because he was a PhD student in political science and had written about politics before.

His father is also in academia and has been politically active and had trouble with authorities due to his own expression. Therefore, Mani cannot return to Iran and his father cannot leave the country to visit him.

His family still gets pressured by security forces because of his own work.

Mr. “Mansour” left Iran eight months ago. He was summoned to Intelligence in Tehran a few days earlier, probably because he is a fairly outspoken LGBT rights activist. Mansour spoke with his lawyer, who advised him that he may be in trouble. His partner has since been summoned by authorities.

He notes that two LGBT parties have been broken up (with arrests) over the past two months, whereas there has only been one in the years before.

There is a general level of societal tolerance for LGBT individuals in the big cities, according to Mansour. Gay people can and do get kicked out of work, etc., but not because of that per se, but rather because the employers often don’t want “trouble.”

Ms Mahnaz was arrested in 1981 for political activities and spent one month in an isolated cell.

In 1984, she was arrested and spent three years at Evin Prison; she was banned from leaving the country for 20 years.

In 1995, she was arrested again, this time for trying to leave Iran without a passport, in violation of her previous travel ban. Authorities had apparently been monitoring her calls, and also got to know that she was a lesbian. She was sentenced to a suspended sentence of three years in prison for her political activities and to 100 lashes for lesbianism.

She then left the country.

She points out that Iran is a hetero-normative society, so it tolerates gender-reassignment surgery; individuals who really should not be reassigned are often pushed to undergo the procedure, sometimes very hastily and without proper prior psychological counseling or necessary medical preparation.

She does believe that there is a sense amongst the younger generation that “human rights” can help bolster their quality of life.

Mr. “Reza”

Labour rights activist

Mr Reza was condemned to death in 1970 by the Shah, because he was politically active outside of the country (as a leftist).

He returned to Iran three days before the Revolution, for political reasons (he was already established abroad otherwise).

He was arrested three years after the Revolution, and spent seven months in prison with no trial. He was not tortured, but authorities were very interested in his political affiliations. He was later released, but not permitted to leave the country. He was later able to pay 6 million tumans to a member of the Revolutionary Guard in order to have the travel ban lifted. He then continued to work in Iran.

Mr Reza began running underground guilds of tool-makers and mechanics. He also helped organize a network of groups of civil unions. He and other colleagues printed 1,000 or 1,500 copies of their pamphlet, but they later found out that other people in the country had printed out 100,000.

In 2010, someone stopped, pulled up beside him in a white van, and officers came out and took his watch and his wallet and blindfolded him. He was trying to figure out which route they took; he thinks they traveled to the Intelligence Center at Evin Prison.

This time he was tortured. They would pull chairs out from beneath him, and they beat him with an iron rod; they broke one of the bones on the sole of his foot. It seemed that they wanted him to admit connections to the MEK, although he had none. He requested medical attention for his swollen foot, but instead they put extra pressure on his foot until he lost consciousness. They said: “Ok, now it’s time for you to cooperate with us.” They showed him a picture of his 80-year-old mother-in-law in his own house, laying on the floor, looking like she had been pushed. They threatened to “destroy” his life. He agreed to cooperate.

They put him in a car blindfolded and freed him on the highway. He went to a hospital and had his foot plastered (there is permanent damage). About three months later, he managed to leave the country.

Mr Goli was a student at the faculty of the University at Oroumiyeh. Toward the end of his time in Iran, he was with the Democratic Kurdish Student Union, a group that promoted the human rights of Kurds.

He had been covering a number of Kurdish cases, but in particular he was covering the case of Ebrahim Lotfullahi, who was killed by authorities, and another case of death-in-detention of a Kurdish activist.

His mother and elder brother were already in prison at that time. His mother was sentenced to two years in prison for belonging to a group called “Mothers of Peace.”

In late 2008, Amir was still at university, but after a strike by Kurdish prisoners in Iran, authorities began to watch him (he had been the organizer of this strike). Authorities came to his house and turned his house “upside-down.” He first moved around near Sanandaj for a month or so, then was practically in a new city every day. He left in the autumn of 2010.

Amir would like to mention one particular case, which no human rights groups have mentioned. Habibah Tanhayan was killed in detention in 2003 and his body was returned to his family unceremoniously, with no explanation of his death.

Mr. Goli was arrested in early 2006 for the first time. He spent 11 days in the Intelligence section of Sanandaj. There was not any abuse or torture, but his prison conditions were very unsanitary. Upon release was told that he would be able to finish his university degree, which he was almost finished with at that point.

But after he finished his last course and went to complete his oral exam, he was told that because he had been arrested by Intelligence, he should check with them. Intelligence officials at the office told him, that undoubtedly that they did not want students who took orders from “foreign influences,” and that he should “go get a degree abroad” if he wanted one.

The second time he was arrested, in the autumn of 2006, he was beaten up by Intelligence officials. One would beat him up, and he would fall into the arms of another, who would beat him. They had other prisoners come in and say that they saw him with five pounds of bombs strapped to his chest. They asked him to confess to this, but he refused. They then threatened to bring in his family in to beat them up and well. After 91 days at the Intelligence Center, he was transferred to the Sanandaj prison. During this time, he encountered Ebrahim Lotfullahi, the Kurdish student activist who later died under mysterious circumstance in detention.

Ms. Goftari left Iran four years ago. She is the mother of Amir and Yaser Goli.

By 2006, one of her sons had fled, one was in prison, and her husband was also in prison, “so they took me to prison as well.”

When her son Yaser had been arrested (in 2006), prison officials called her to ask her to come get his possessions. He was to pay his university tuition that day, so he had quite a bit of tuition money on him. She told them that her husband would come, but they said no, she should come. They told her not to be scared, that she should come to a kiosk and it would only take two minutes. She decided she would not go alone, so she took her other son Amir. They were not far from the prison when a car pulled up, and she was worried that they were there to arrest her son. But they grabbed her neck and tried to arrest her. She told him: “Don’t worry, take my bag, I will flee from the other side of the car.” But there was someone blocking the way. They treated her harshly and brought her to the Intelligence Center. There, she saw Habibollah Latifi, who was a friend of her son, so she said hello. They banged his head against the wall until he bled. From then on, they were fixated on her connection with him, although, as she kept telling them, she only knew him because he was a friend of her son. They kept her in the Detention Center for eight days and then moved her to a prison. She still had not been presented with charges. She was now in a cell with 50 other women.

One morning in the prison she woke up because she heard terrible crying. She asked two other women what was going on, and they explained that someone was going to be executed. They took her to a bathroom, where they looked through ventilation hole. From there, they could see the hanging rope. The person who was going to be hanged was crying. They would also threaten her often. They did not beat her body, but did slap her face.

After she saw the rope, she decided, along with those two women, that she would embark on a hunger strike. This lasted five days, during which she developed a stomach ulcer. So she and the other women stopped. Three days after this hunger strike, she was taken to a Revolutionary Court. Her trial was five minutes long. At the court, her judge told her: “You are a trouble-maker. Wherever you go, you make trouble.” The court demanded five millon tuman bail.

She was sentenced to three years for attacking the Government, in the sense that she had insulted them verbally, which was “true, given the fact that her sons were in prison.” Another charge was signing the One Million Signatures Campaign, and a third for working with Mothers for Peace. She did not have access to a lawyer during the trial, and later she had trouble finding one who would take her case. But later she did find one, and he got the sentence reduced to two years. To this day she has no idea why she was targeted (specifically), although she is fairly sure it’s because of her family’s convictions and because as a member of the Mothers for Peace, they would mourn the deaths of all victims of the Government, including members of the political and other groups, without discrimination.

Early one the morning in Sanandaj, two months after her release from prison, she went to buy bread. Since she had already been to prison, she had a “sort of sixth-sense,” and realized that two people were watching her. She thought this was probably because they wanted to arrest her younger son Amir. She went home and warned him, and told him she would go to her mother’s house. Within 50 meters from that house, two gentlemen with smoky eyeglasses approached her and grabbed her, one from each side, and told her to go to a side street. While they were walking, she was insulting them and trying to make them angry. At the same time, she took off her shoes and tried to flee. When she began running, one grabbed her overcoat and stopped her. She threw dirt into one of their eyes and ran into a public square. She ran into a store and even though the shopkeeper was trying to kick her out, she stayed and called her family and told her she was going to go to her brother-in-law’s place, 20 minutes from Sanandaj.

She stayed at her brother’s house for two days. Her husband and son Amir joined her there, and one morning, at 4am, they fled to the Suleiymaniyeh in the Kurdish Regional Government, Iraq.

Amjad Hossein Panahi

Kurdish rights activist

Mr. Amjad Hossein Panahi works for the Defense of Political and Civil Prisoners in Iran (particularly Kurdistan) and the Union of Families of Political Prisoners in Kurdistan.

In addition to the two organizations for which he works, there are also organizations in Iran that work nonviolently for the protection of Kurdish rights, although all are operating illegally.

He noted that dozens of Kurdish political prisoners remain are on death row with sentences confirmed by the Supreme Court.

Four of ten remaining Kurdish prisoners are still on death row Jamshid Dehgani, his younger brother, Jahangir Dehgani, Hamed Ahmadi, and Kamal Molayee. All were accused of involvement in the murder of a Friday Imam, and all have suffered forced confession and a lack of due process and forced confession.

One of the prisoners is a child and is married. They claim that they have not had any contacts with Al-Qaeda, Wahabbis, or other extremists groups, despite the fact that the Government has charged them with this. They are “simply Kurds from Sanandaj.” They were supposedly arrested for events affiliated with a Salafist named Sheikh al-Islam, but in reality they were arrested “before his activities.”

They have been kept in solitary confinement, and apparently endure psychological and physical torture. Their trial did not last more than ten minutes. Six of the original ten have been executed already. The rest are reportedly in bad condition or sick, including one who has convulsions and must take 21 pills per day.

In order to pay the 210 million tuman bail for her after she left the country, her family had to sell their house to the Government (the debt is now paid). They bought a smaller house, and the Government has since razed the house to build an apartment complex.

Ms. Mithra Tahimi had been taken prisoner in May 1983, because she was a member of the Tudeh Party (a secret branch). She was arrested at home by the Revolutionary Guards. She was taken to a Joint Committee, which is now a museum. She was subject to interrogation for one month and held at the temporary detention center for a full year. In 1984, she was sent to Evin Prison. The charge was that she had worked with others to foment a coup against the Islamic Republic, which was “completely untrue. “She had been tortured and beaten during interrogation to admit this, but not as badly as higher-ranking members of the party (two of them were actually killed, although the official story is that they committed suicide. One of them was Rahman Hatifi). When she was being interrogated, they constantly threatened her with execution, which she knew was unlikely given the lack of evidence for charges. Then they told her that if she confessed on television she would receive a lighter sentence.

She was taken to court in May 1985 and sentenced to 15 years in prison after a trial lasting no more than 10 minutes. There were only two men in the room. It was “more like an interrogation than a trial.” She protested, but to no avail. No evidence was presented against her. They wanted to know why there was a secret wing of the Tudeh Party. (The Tudeh Party still supported the Islamic Republic officially).

She spent her sentence mostly in Evin Prison, with six months at Ghezel Hesar in the middle of the sentence.

In 1988, a number of male members of the Tudeh Party were executed. Ms Tahimi was taken to court again at that time and re-tried, as were many members of Tudeh. Many of the men were sentenced to death, while the women received lashing sentences. A number of women whose sentences had been dually served were not released, because authorities still wanted to extract confessions. In her cell block, the first floor was reserved for those whose sentences were completed. The second was for those who had “repented,” and the third was for those still serving sentences. Women from the first floor were often taken to “repentance” rooms. She herself was required to pray; if she did not, they would accuse her of apostasy.

A few months before she was taken for her re-trial, it seemed that some of the prison officials had been released, and they were no longer lashing women. Some women had by that point been released, but she had no way of knowing how many, since they secretly shuffled people around the prison.

In September of 1988, they took seven women -- five from the bottom floor and two from the top floor. She thought she was going for another interrogation, but they took them to court. The women had already decided that if they threatened them with apostasy charges they would threaten a dry hunger strike. When they got to the court, she was blindfolded. A male voice told her to take her blindfold off. The same judge who had previously sentenced her was there, along with the prison discipline officer. The judge asked her whether she still belonged to the Tudeh party; she said yes. Was her father in the party? “No”. Do you pray? No. “Well then,” the judge said, “the penalty for apostasy is lashing to death.” They said she would be lashed five times for each of the five times per day she refused to pray (which she notes was interesting, since in Shi’a Islam they only pray three times per day), until she would sign a document verifying that she was a Muslim and prayed. When she was first arrested, and for the bulk of her imprisonment, questions revolved around Marxism leanings, but in 1988 they focused on whether or not the prisoners considered themselves Muslims.

In 1990, she was conditionally released -- but not fully released -- from prison. She had been in prison for eight years.

She left Iran in 1994.

Ms. “Noura”

Former political prisoner / advocate for Ayatollah Boroujerdi

Ms. “Noura” came to discuss the case of Ayatollah Boroujerdi.

She claims that the Supreme Leader is denying him necessary medical help. Ms. Noura claims that the Supreme Leader has contacted Ayatollah Boroujerdi directly. She also claims that prison officials have told Mr. Boroujerdi directly that if he does not write a letter recanting his beliefs, he will never be released.

Since last autumn, the situation of Mr. Boroujerdi has worsened. Authorities have increased their pressure on him to sign confession letters and have called and pressured his wife and family to pressure him to sign in turn.

His supporters have asked for the European Parliament delegation to intervene on his behalf. They have also asked others to intervene, but they have not been successful.

Ms. Noura herself was in prison. She was a college lecturer, and established a center in physical/neuro-chemistry. She was very successful, but because of her political beliefs (liberal) she was exiled to work in a small library. When she returned to university, she was also pushed not to work with certain people. She then tried to establish a journal, and even then when her articles were published, authorities censored her name from journals.

She began working with Ayatollah Boroujerdi, and in 2006, when her son was a baby, authorities attacked her home at night and arrested her. Her mother had heart problems, and after that suffered from a heart attack.

She left the country two years ago.

For university students, those who have left the country have enormous trouble obtaining documents proving their educational history, especially the families of students who were or are politically active or who had to leave the country for similar reasons.

Since 2006, she has herself been taken to prison four times. Once, while she was on the phone with her father, notifying him of her arrest, she was slapped and she screamed. In response, her father had a heart attack and required open-heart surgery.

Kaveh Kermanshahi

Kurdish and human rights defender

Mr. Kermanshahi notes that in April 2013, 15 to 20 LGBT individuals at a party in Kermanshah were arrested. All were freed within one week to ten days of arrest.

Some were released on bail and their court cases are constantly being delayed. Some of the individuals were physically harmed, but most were verbally insulted for being gay. Many of their families have also come under pressure due to their being gay.

Revolutionary Guards also lectured them and told them to come to lectures so that they could be “put on the right path.” Those individuals, therefore, and others at the party, are still living in an atmosphere of fear.

Gender-reassignment surgeries occur because the Islamic Republic views homosexuality as a sickness. Social and family norms do not help, as families often cooperate with the discourse by condemning their own.

Ms. “Maryam”

Khavaran activist in Iran

Ms. “Maryam” would like to point out that the families of those individuals executed in the 1980s still suffer today. Many people in Iran and elsewhere feel that this issue is a “thing of the past,” but the pressure against the families continues to this day.

For years the families have been questioned and harassed. They are sometimes threatened by authorities with prison time as well. Despite this, they continue to go to Khavaran, to pay respects to their dead. Of course they do not know the circumstances of the deaths of their loved ones, or even if they were buried at Khavaran, but it has become an important symbol and place of remembrance.

Ms. Maryam herself was summoned by authorities in within the past four years. She was sentenced to 4.5 years in prison in connected to her Khavaran-related activities,

She has also been banned from leaving Iran since then.

Shaheen Navaee

Women’s rights activist

She was a teacher and women’s rights activist during the Revolution, and authorities arrested her students. They demanded that she teach Basijis, and she refused. She continued to work for a few years as an activist, but she had to leave the country in 1984.

Recently, in a school in Kurdistan, a stove caught fire. Two students died and 30 students were burned, and the Government reportedly prevented some donations of people in the community from reaching the victims’ families. Some prominent Iranians also wanted to visit the region (including artists) but were prevented from visiting. Shazram Nazeri, an Iranian singer, apparently organized a benefit concert which raised 52 million tuman, but she was apparently unable to transmit the proceeds to the victims as well. When family members protested, they were arrested for 24 hours for “causing trouble.”

Families have received only a total of 600,000 tumans for their medical costs. One report also surfaced that money was sent from Germany but was also not transmitted to the victims.

In a separate case, in demonstrations following the self-immolation of three members of the Yarasan minority in 2013, 30 people were arrested and many of their locations are still unknown.