Iranian Protester’s Lawyers Resign As Court Refuses A Meeting With Defendant

Criticizing the insistence of hard-liners on hijab, Azar Mansouri, the female leader of reformist Unity of Nation Party in Iran has argued that the reason why Iranian women burned their headscarves during the recent protests is that the government tried to impose a certain dress code on them in the name of religion.

She said in an article in Etemad newspaper that those who made this mistake did not understand that Islam came to give dignity to all human beings regardless of their gender. "What you are doing is like cutting off the branch you are sitting on," Mansouri told Iranian officials.

Mansouri said people remember viral videos before the protests that started in mid-September, in which a woman was begging the morality police not to arrest her ailing daughter, or many other videos that showed the police's brutality while arresting women for not fully respecting the dress code the government imposed on the people. "Mahsa Amini's death in custody flared up a fire that was under the ashes," Mansouri said in a statement that was identical with what centrist commentator Sadeq Zibakalam had said the previous day.

Mansouri quoted Iranian scholars as saying that "The Woman, Life, Freedom movement started as a result of accumulated dissatisfactions and the widening divides between the government and the Iranian society. She warned that the uprising could still re-emerge.

The politician expressed hope that the government will adopt a realistic policy about how to deal with the people and will start serious legal and structural reforms. However, she warned that what people hear from official podiums erodes any hope in reforms. She pointed out the arrest of Iranian artists for removing their hijab and heavy sentences for them, as well as the killing of many young men and women during the protests as an indication that reforms are unlikely in Iran.

Opposition to the government's heavy-handed approach to enforcing hijab and punishing detained protesters has been on the rise during the past days even by some Muslim clerics. Mohammad Ashrafi-Esfahani has said that "Executions carried out following recent protests are not based on sound legal foundations." He also pointed out that "many top clerics are silent about it because they think no one in the government will care for their attestations."

However, Ashrafi-Esfahani stopped short of saying that many top clerics fear retribution by the government if they speak against the hardliners who control the government and the Judiciary system and are supported by Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. Nonetheless, the cleric said: "It might help if the leader in a bid to calm the situation tells the Judiciary to deal with prisoners compassionately. This will also be a good publicity for the Islamic Republic."

In her article in Etemad, Ms. Mansouri observed that Iranian women have expressed their opposition to the dress code imposed by the government all along in the past four decades. They have also objected to discrimination against women under the Islamic Republic. But nobody paid any attention to their grievances. She argued that there were no serious confrontations between women and the government until hardliners boldly introduced the morality police.

In the meantime, she said, a government-imposed glass ceiling prevented Iranian women's access to equal rights with men in the areas of education and employment. She concluded that it was this unfair treatment of women and ignoring their rights that triggered their revolt in September and what is now known as the ‘Woman, Life, Freedom’ movement.

“We, the political and ideological prisoners in the women’s ward of Evin Prison, demand an end to the execution of protesters and an end to unjust sentences of prisoners in Iran,” they say in the petition.

The women inmates including French-Iranian academic Fariba Adelkhah, the daughter of a former president Faezeh Hashemi and political activist Sepideh Qolian say their group of 30 prisoners have been “sentenced to a total of 124 years in prison through unfair and non-transparent procedures.”

Despite coming from different religious and political backgrounds, “we have come together to say ‘no’ to execution. We defend people’s right to live in justice,” reads the petition.

The letter is published in a situation that according to the Norway-based Iran Human Rights Organization at least 109 protesters arrested since mid-September are at risk of imminent execution or death sentence.

This is apart from the four protestors that the Islamic Republic has already executed on charges of "corruption on earth and war against God," without access to a lawyer and a fair trial.

In more than four months, over 500 citizens have been killed by government agents, dozens of whom were children. In the meantime, about 20,000 protesters have also been arrested.

“I’m extending my hand, once again, for cooperation to all pro-democracy forces, including individuals, parties and groups, to support the Iranian national revolution on the basis of three minimum common principles: Iran's territorial integrity, human rights-based secular democracy, and people’s right to determine the form of the [future] political system through a free vote,” he said in a statement published via his social media accounts Saturday.

The statement came after a petition endorsing him as representative of his supporters to lead a transition from the Islamic Republic to secular rule launched Tuesday by actor Ehsan Karami received over 300,000 signatures by Saturday. “This petition helps the people of Iran to express their opinion,” Karami said.

One of the first to support the campaign was expatriate Iranian football star Ali Karimi, a key supporter of the popular uprising, who has millions of followers on Instagram and Twitter. The number of signatures has now risen to over 350,000 on Sunday.

Karami said he had launched the petition because the exiled crown prince had in an interview with London-based Manoto TV asked the people of Iran to give him power of attorney to lead the movement against the Islamic Republic.

In response to a question why he was not openly accepting the leadership of the movement, Pahlavi said any kind of work, presumably lobbying with world powers and international organizations, required “a legitimate basis or some kind of power of attorney from inside Iran."

Signatories of the petition include several celebrities but so far Karimi is the only high-profile expatriate opposition figure recognized as one of the likely members of a future transitory council to have signed the petition and campaigned for it.

Other known figures representing the protest movement, including actress and human rights activist Nazanin Bonyadi, journalist and activist Masih Alinejad, actress Golshifteh Farahani, activist Hamed Esmaeilion, and Nobel Peace Laureate Shirin Ebadi have so far neither endorsed nor rejected the plea.

Some regime opponents imprisoned in Iran, including Manouchehr Bakhtiari have endorsed him. Bakhtiari is an ardent believer in reviving the monarchy. He is jailed for his anti-regime activism after his 23-year-old son Pouya was shot in the head during the November 2019 protests in Karaj.

The petition has given rise to intense arguments on social media with those in favor tweeting with the hashtag “I endorse power of attorney” and others using the hashtag “I do not endorse power of attorney”. The exiled prince is currently among the top ten Persian-language hashtags on Twitter now.

In recent years, the former crown prince has not laid claim to the throne, and at least on one occasion said his own desirable government would be a republic rather than a monarchy, but many of his supporters, who always refer to him affectionately as ‘The Prince’ see him as the future king of the country.

“Based on the Iranian Constitution [of 1906], Prince Reza Pahlavi is the heir to the Iranian throne. There’s no plan for him to establish a government … This [power of attorney] is giving him permission to meet political representatives and officials of other governments,” Kamelia Entekhabifard, chief editor of the Persian website of The Independent, told the BBC’s Persian television Wednesday.

Entekhabifard argued that giving such power of attorney to the exiled crown prince would prevent others without proper credentials, a clear past, and well-defined demands to meet with foreign officials.

“At least the Prince is emphasizing the principles of territorial integrity of the country, freedom of religion, equal rights for all Iranians,” she said while stressing that Pahlavi has always emphasized it is the Iranian people who should decide their future form of government through free elections.

Others -- notably some republicans and leftist politicians and activists – reject giving power of attorney to the exiled crown prince while even some of his supporters say empowering one person is undemocratic and would pave the way for future troubles.

In their view, only a council consisting of prominent political figures and activists can be a true representative of the Iranian people in any talks over the future of the Islamic Republic with world powers.

“I endorse power of attorney”, the Marxist Iran Left Party (Fadaiyan-e Khlagh) said in a statement Saturday, “is undemocratic both is form and content” and argued that appointing the exiled crown prince as Iranians’ representative, without setting any conditions, is similar to the yes-no referendum in 1979 that determined Iran's form of government as an Islamic Republic and disregards the “political and civil society in the country”.

Proponents of endorsing the exiled prince as a representative say those who do not want him can propose their own candidates, but the revolution needs leadership.

In the most recent case, Kian Pirfalak's mother has been banned from her job at a school. The ten-year-old Kian Pirfalak was shot dead by plainclothesmen in Izeh in the southwestern province of Khuzestan on November 16.

According to the Coordinating Council of Iranian Teachers' Trade Association the ministry of education summoned Zeinab Mollaie-Rad, on Saturday telling her that "until further notice, she must not go to school."

Meanwhile, brother of Ahmad Raisi, the former employee of a university in the western city of Hamedan reported that his brother is locked in solitary confinement and has been on a hunger strike for the past 10 days.

Reports also say prisoners are still being tortured in custody. Activists say Mazaher Heydari, a detainee belonging to the Gonabadi Dervish religious sect, was transferred from Chabahar Prison in the south to Shahrekord in the west last week for more interrogation. Heydari, had previously informed about his torture and forced confessions.

The judiciary further continues to issue heavy sentences for detainees. Reyhaneh Taravati, a photographer and civil activist, was sentenced to six years in prison on a charge of "holding gatherings and propaganda against the regime", which will be enforceable for 5 years if confirmed in the appeals court.

Melika Heshemi, the reporter of Shahr news agency, who had gone to Evin prison, has been arrested too.

Activists say Hassan Firouzi fell into coma on Friday because of torture, bleeding and lack of access to treatment.

The-34-year-old man was brutally tortured after being arrested during recent protests, according to human rights organizations, and a revolutionary court sentenced him to death.

Iran Human Rights Monitor, a non-political France-based organization that reveals human rights violations in Iran, announced January 16 that Hassan Firouzi had said his "only wish" was to see his daughter before execution.

The report says Hasan Firouzi suffered severe bleeding after torture and beatings by interrogators with a chair, and while he lost his left kidney, no treatment was provided to him.

Meanwhile, the lawyer of one of the detained protestors in Khorramabad in Western Iran said his client fell into coma due to an infection from injuries he sustained during the arrest.

"My client, Mohammad Ekhtiarian, one of the detainees in recent protests, is in a coma due to the infection of the wounds caused during the arrest," he wrote on his Instagram page.

According to Iran's Prisons Atlas, Mohammad Ekhtiarian is a bodybuilder and during the nationwide protests following the death of Mahsa Amini in police custody, he was wounded in the leg after being shot by the security forces and then arrested.