Youth Arrested In Iran Tortured To Accuse Each Other

The demonstrators held the gathering to prevent Mohammadreza Hamian and Alireza Hesam, both 22, to be sent home after their asylum application was rejected in December despite their attempts to gather as many documents as possible.

The men had arrived in Belgium after taking part in anti-government protests against the clerical rulers in Iran. However, they now fear for their lives.

“We have been in a closed reception center for 80 days, and no one hears our voice,” one of them told RTBF, the Belgian Radio-television of the French Community.

"The whole world knows what is happening in Iran for a few months. We were in the streets asking for freedom. The whole world knows what we risk if we go back to Iran ," they told RTBF from the center.

“Returning to Iran equals death, like what happened to many other young people like us in Iran ,” they say.

A Monday flight will take them to Turkey, and then they might be sent back to Iran.

Ali Amerian, the lawyer of these two asylum seekers, and Darya Safaei, an Iranian member of the Belgian Parliament, have asked the government to stop their deportation.

Nicole de Moor, the Secretary of State for Asylum and Migration said “asylum is really reserved for those who fear individual persecution, which was not the case for these two people, according to the independent analysis of our asylum authorities.”

News outlets have identified the two female journalists as Saeedeh Shafiei and Mehrnoosh Zarei.

Hassan Homayoun, the husband of Saeedeh Shafiei said in a tweet Sunday that the writer and civil activist was arrested by the security forces at their home.

The US-based Human Rights Activists News Agency (HRANA) also reported that Shafiei was transferred to an unknown place and there is no information about the reasons for her arrest.

HRANA further reported that another journalist identified as Mehrnoosh Zarei has been detained and transferred to the notorious Evin prison in the capital Tehran.

“The security forces searched Zarei's house without introducing their institutional affiliation and after confiscating some of her digital equipment, they took her to the prison,” wrote HRANA.

Zarei has a history of cooperation with ILNA, ISKA, Chelcheragh and Anna news agencies.

According to a report by a committee that follows up on the situation of the detainees, 69 journalists have been arrested during the protests following the death of Mahsa Amini in police custody in mid-September with some of them freed on bail.

The report says several journalists have been sentenced to imprisonment and banned from leaving the country.

The arrest of media activists and issuing heavy sentences for them comes as the judiciary previously claimed that "no journalist is in prison because of his/her job."

Armita Abbasi’s father says attorneys Mohammad Esmailbeigi and Sonia Mohammadi have resigned because they were not able to defend her daughter properly.

Esmailbeigi, who could get the court’s approval for representing Armita, was not granted permission to meet with his client after four days, which forced him announce his resignation on Twitter.

Armita's mother also wrote on Twitter that the lawyer's explanation makes sense because he does not have the opportunity to defend Armita.

Some other lawyers have reported that their letters of attorney were not accepted in similar cases by the courts of the Islamic Republic.

Most detained protesters and dissidents are not allowed to have their own lawyers and their trials are held in a quick manner behind closed doors.

Armita Abbasi, 21, was arrested in late September during the protests following the death of Mahsa Amini in hijab police custody. According to leaked reports, she was gang-raped many times after being arrested, for which she was taken to hospital. Security forces quickly kidnapped her from the hospital and took her back to prison.

After Armita Abbasi’s arrest, her family went to the hospital in Karaj, but the agents took her out of before they arrived.

Alborz province judiciary said on November 8 that "the news published about the death or rape of Armita Abbasi is baseless and not true."

The trial of Armita Abbasi is scheduled to be held on January 29.

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.

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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.