A concert of Iran's Alireza Ghorbani has been cancelled by Iranian officials in Esfahan, citing the presence of female musicians on stage, amid the regime's continued crackdown on women's rights.
"Bringing a female musician, according to the fatwa of the scholars, is not permissible if there is a possibility of corruption," claimed the Headquarters for Enjoining the Good and Forbidding the Evil in a statement.
The cancellation marks the second time Ghorbani's concert has been banned. On Monday evening, despite hundreds of ticket holders gathering at the venue, the event was halted by hardline forces preventing the artists from performing.
Expressing his frustration on Instagram on October 16, Ghorbani highlighted the "Herculean efforts" of his team to organize the concert, only to face permit denial.
Since the 1979 Islamic Revolution, female vocalists have been prohibited from performing, while music concerts overall have encountered significant regulatory obstacles.
The lack of women's rights in Iran has drawn intense scrutiny following the death of Mahsa Amini in September 2022. Amini's death while in morality police custody for a headscarf defiance sparked nationwide protests in Iran, with women and schoolgirls demonstrating unprecedented support for women's rights, posing a significant challenge to the Islamic government.
Majid Dastjani Farahani, sanctioned by the US treasury in December 2023, is believed to be an officer from Iran’s intelligence ministry recruiting individuals “for operations in the U.S.,” as revenge for the killing of Iran’s top extra-territorial operator in the Middle East, General Qasem Soleimani four years ago.
The Iranian regime has never hidden its intentions to avenge Soleimani’s killing. High on their hit list seem to be Trump-era officials who could be imagined having had a role in the decision to strike Soleimani’s convoy at the Baghdad airport on January 3, 2020.
“The Islamic Republic of Iran, through all tools and capacities in order to bring to justice the perpetrators and all those who had a hand in this government sanctioned act of terror, will not sit until that is done,” Iran’s President Ebrahim Raisi said in his UN General Assembly address last September. “The blood of the oppressed will not be forgotten.”
Former secretary of state Mike Pompeo and Trump’s special envoy for Iran, Brian Hook, are believed to be targets, both under round-the-clock protection from the US government. The provision is costing the American taxpayer around a million dollars each month, as revealed in a US Senate hearing last week featuring Brian Hook.
Also on the hit list is John Bolton, who was Trump’s national security advisor in the months leading up to the killing of Soleimani.
It’s unclear whether Farahani is believed to have succeeded in recruiting someone, and if he did, how far they managed to advance their plan on American soil. The FBI says that Farahani has also attempted to recruit individuals to spy on some “religious sites, businesses, and other facilities in the United States.”
Farahani acted or purported to act “for or on behalf of, directly or indirectly, Iran's Ministry of Intelligence and Security,” according to the FBI. He is said to travel “frequently” to Venezuela from Iran and speaks Spanish –all of which could explain, partially at least, why the Most Wanted notice was issued by the FBI's field office in Miami.
Iran seems to be focused on enlisting non-Iranians, especially criminals or armed militia, to act on its behalf, mainly, it seems, to avoid culpability. This is perhaps most evident in Iran’s attack on US interests in the Middle East, which is always directed through the regime’s proxies in the region.
But planning operations inside the United States is less evident and far in between.
In 2021, U.S. authorities revealed that there was a plot to kidnap Iranian-American activist, Masih Alinejad, from her home in Brooklyn and take her by speedboat to Venezuela. In January 2024, the US Justice Department indicted three natives of Azerbaijan for allegedly attempting to murder Alinejad in New York.
Around the same time, the Justice Department also indicted an Iranian gang leader plotting to assassinate unnamed Iranian dissidents in Maryland.
Targeting dissidents and opposition figures abroad has been a hallmark of the Iranian regime ever since its inception in 1979. Iranian activists, journalists, even artists, have been assassinated in cold blood and often in gruesome fashion to eliminate political alternatives –and also set examples for those daring to oppose the Islamic Republic.
But targeting US officials on American soil is adventurism of a different order. It is not clear if the new revelation will result in any action by the Biden administration that spent its first two years in office to try reach some sort of a deal with Iran over its sprawling nuclear program.
Economist Morteza Afghah told ILNA that every report about the possibility of Trump's victory or polls in favor of the Republican Party leads to the rial’s devaluation as a return to Republican rule in the US signals a choking of the Iranian economy with Trump seen as a US president with the most negative impacts on the regime.
In 2018, Trump pulled out of the 2015 nuclear deal – known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Actions or JCPOA – and imposed ‘maximum pressure’ sanctions on Tehran, practically reducing Iran’s oil exports to less than 500,000 barrels per day and blocking the revenues in foreign banks.
Afghah noted that a myriad of factors play a role in the devaluation of the rial such as the country's foreign policy and the regional tensions over the war in Gaza. Iran backs several regional militia groups in Lebanon, Iraq and Syria as well as Yemen that have escalated attacks on US and Israeli targets in allegiance with Hamas.
The Iran-backed Islamist group invaded Israel on October 7, killed about 1,200 mostly civilians and took about 240 hostages, igniting the worst Middle East conflict in years. Meanwhile, Iran's Yemeni militia, the Houthis, are now imposing a blockade on trade routes around the Red Sea in support of Hamas in Gaza, causing huge economic implications to global trade.
According to Afghah, another factor that has been fueling the rise of foreign currency rates against the rial is the high demand for dollars and euros in the last weeks of the Iranian year, which ends on March 20 and ushers the Noruz (Nowruz) in Iran. During the two-week holidays, many Iranians take trips abroad, making the demand for foreign currency far higher than the Iranian authorities can supply.
Afghah made the remarks after the rial hit a low of about 600,000 against the dollar on Sunday. The Central Bank of Iran (CBI) has been injecting foreign currency into the market to curb the devaluation of the rial but after a historic low turnout in Iran’s elections on March 1 and the prospects of Trump winning the office in the US, the CBI’s efforts seem inconsequential.
The analyst says the fall of rial will continue until at least the end of March and the CBI does not have enough foreign currency supply to control the market as the administration has been draining all its strategic reserves, including the National Development Fund, in the past two years to balance its budget deficit.
Former US president Trump swept a trio of states Saturday, inching his way closer to a formal Republican party nomination for president. But the weekend also featured a bright spot for Nikki Haley, who won her first state in the nominating cycle with a victory in Sunday's Washington, DC, primaries. However, even Haley is a tough critic of the Iranian regime and strongly defended Trump’s decision to withdraw from the JCPOA.
For critics outside Iran, the JCPOA symbolizes a policy of appeasement with Tehran’s destabilizing acts across the region and human rights violations at home. Dissidents and critics of the regime in Tehran view the nuclear deal as the West tolerating Iran’s military adventurism and crackdown on dissent as a measure to keep the path of diplomacy open. The majority of the Iranian population and a large number of foreign officials believe that years of punitive measures against Tehran have proved that sanctions and condemnations will not lead to a change in the regime's behavior, only becoming further emboldened in its policy of hostage-taking and accelerating its nuclear program in the face of sanctions.
Ruling hardliners in Iran are growing increasingly apprehensive about the possibility of a Republican victory in US presidential elections, leading to a tougher stance towards Tehran. Trump's withdrawal from the JCPOA shattered the hopes of both Iranian hardliners and moderates, who had envisioned reaping benefits from the nuclear deal with the West in exchange for curbing their nuclear ambitions, while expanding their conventional capabilities and regional influence.
Although the Biden Administration has been too lenient on Iran and often turned a blind eye in the face of mischiefs by the regime, politicians in Tehran still believe that Biden could have done more than giving billions of dollars to Iran in return for releasing US hostages and releasing Iran's frozen assets in South Korea, Iraq and elsewhere.
Making matters worse, the results of Iran’s March 1 elections show that some of Iran's lawmakers known to be staunch critics of the JCPOA have been reelected for the parliament. Morteza Ezzati, an economic analyst, told Rouydad24, “The representatives who will apparently be in the next parliament are known to be anti-JCPOA, which could seriously threaten the public interest and also provoke a reaction from the global community.”
He noted that the history of hardliners at the helm shows that whenever they are the decision makers, they have dragged the economy to the brink of bankruptcy.
Lamenting the absence of accountability measures in Iran, Javaid Rehman pointed to recent cases where international law and universal jurisdiction were used to hold individuals and Iran accountable.
For this avenue to be pursued, Iranian officials, whether former or current, would need to be apprehended outside of Iran.
In a landmark case in 2022, former Iranian prison official Hamid Nouri was convicted of war crimes and murder by the Stockholm District Court, leveraging universal jurisdiction.
Nouri was ultimately sentenced to life imprisonment for his involvement in the 1988 prison massacres in Iran, where thousands of political prisoners were executed on the orders of Iran’s former ruler, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.
The UN official also highlighted a forthcoming case at the International Court of Justice concerning the 2020 shootdown of Ukrainian International Airlines Flight PS752 by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC).
Canada, Sweden, Ukraine, and the United Kingdom, whose citizens were among those killed in the flight, are pursuing legal action against Iran for the unlawful downing of the passenger jet by the IRGC.
Initially, the Islamic Republic denied it fired the two missiles, and has yet to be held accountable for the attack that led to the death of all 176 people on board.
Rehman pointed to the absence of an independent judiciary, which has long been politicized, as one of the key causes of continued impunity and lack of accountability in the Islamic Republic.
UN Official expresses alarm over surge in executions
The UN expert’s 42-page report also gave an updated view of the Iranian regime’s gross human rights violations.
Rehman wrote that 2023 saw a spike of death penalty sentences and executions, with at least 834 people hanged – marking a 43% increase compared to the previous year.
Over half of the reported executions were for drug-related charges.
Iran also remains one of the leading executioners of women, with at least 22 women executed last year, with the report noting that many were victims of domestic violence or child marriage.
The Special Rapporteur particularly expressed alarm over the disproportionate number of executions of all kinds of members of minority communities, in particular the Baluchi and Kurdish minorities.
Death sentences handed down after unfair trials, torture and denial of legal representation disproportionately affected “ethnic and religious minorities, particularly Baluchis, in Iran,” the report read.
The latest numbers suggest at least 170 Baluchis and 181 Kurdish prisoners were executed last year.
Over 80 offenses in the Islamic Republic’s criminal justice system that are punishable by the death penalty do not meet the criteria for "most serious crimes." These include ambiguous national security charges and non-violent crimes, which contravene international human rights standards.
The report says at least 39 persons were executed after being convicted of national security charges.
The above-mentioned figures represent official executions and frequently exclude arbitrary killings perpetrated by Iranian authorities, whether in the streets amid protests or within prisons.
The Special Rapporteur called for the Islamic Republic to abolish the death penalty immediately, for all offenses.
While the UN official provided a comprehensive list of recommendations, he acknowledged that none of his previous suggestions to end institutional impunity and ensure accountability for serious human rights violations have been implemented.