She is currently in Evin Prison on multiple charges, including spreading propaganda against the government, with 10 years, nine months left on her sentence. She issued a statement on hearing the news: “I will continue to fight against the relentless discrimination, tyranny and gender-based oppression by the oppressive religious government until the liberation of all women.”

She supported last year’s movement for “Woman, Life, Liberty” from behind bars, have long criticized compulsory veiling.

Mohammadi’s causes included women’s rights, of course. But she has also campaigned for human rights more generally, including the right of women to be safe from sexual harassment even in prison and of prisoners to be safe from torture and from the death penalty.

Although many observers in the United States will applaud this award as a black eye for the self-styled Islamic Republic of Iran, the fact is that Mohammadi would be critical of American policies as well. That is, if we are to listen to her prophetic voice with approval, we must do more than use her politically to denigrate our enemies; we must take to heart the implications of her ethical witness for our own society, too.

For instance, there were 18 executions of prisoners in the United States in 2022, up 64% from the total of 11 killed by the state in 2021. Although the US executes many fewer prisoners each year than Iran or Saudi Arabia, and although the number in the US has fallen significantly since the 1990s, it still does execute prisoners, and Ms. Mohammadi deeply believes that is wrong. She might well be in jail here if she lived in the United States, from protesting in front of city halls and jails. Only 13 states still permit executions in the US, and half of those killed in 2022 were executed in Texas and Oklahoma.

Moreover, 7 of these executions were seriously botched. In one instance, it took 3 hours of trying to get a fatal intravenous line into the arm of an Alabama convict. Some initial attempts to kill the convict were called off because of difficulties with the intravenous injection or because proper protocols has not been followed.

Between 46% and 54% of Americans believe in capital punishment, depending on which poll you believe. So Mohammadi might well be in a minority on this issue in the US, as well.

As for torture, Karen J. Greenburg wrote this week about the scandal that the Guantánamo Prison Camp still has not been closed. One of the difficulties has been that some prisoners were so badly tortured that no court, including a military tribunal, can now conduct a legitimate trial.

There has never been a reckoning by the US establishment with the Bush administration’s extensive use of torture.

If Mohammadi had been an American she might have been put on trial, as Josie Setzler was, for protesting torture at Guantánamo.

As for sexual abuse of female prisoners by male guards in federal prisons, a Senate report from last year makes it clear that this is a real issue and that it hasn’t been adequately addressed by the Bureau of Prisons.

Regarding women’s rights, I doubt Ms. Mohammadi would approve of Nebraska jailing a woman for two years for giving abortion pills to her daughter. In fact, I have a sneaking suspicion that she would not like our current Supreme Court much at all. She rails against religious theocrats’ repression of women.

So a warm congratulations to her, and to her cause, of women’s rights and human rights in Iran. But we owe it to ourselves also actually to listen to what she is saying and to take to heart the principles for which she has spent so much of her life in jail, torn from her husband and children.

Bad Laws Have Become Worse Under MBS

Joey Shea

Researcher, Saudi Arabia and United Arab Emirates

 

@joey_shea

Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, known as MBS, has confirmed that retired teacher Muhammed al Ghamdi was indeed sentenced to death for his social media posts. In an interview with Fox News on September 20, MBS admitted about the death sentence: “Shamefully, it’s true,” and blamed the sentence on “bad laws.”

On Thursday, Saudi Arabia executed a displaced religious resident on charges of killing a Saudi in the capital, Riyadh, the official Saudi Press Agency (SPA) reported on Friday.

This brought the number of executions so far in 2023 to 102 people, according to Agence France-Presse, based on official data, including 33 people executed for conviction in terrorism-related cases.

Saudi Arabia carried out 147 death sentences in 2022.

SPA did not provide details on how the execution was carried out, noting that the Kingdom often carries out death sentences by beheading.

Human rights organisations assert that these executions undermine the Kingdom’s efforts to improve its image by approving social and economic amendments as part of its reformative Vision 2030 programme.

“In clear contrast to Saudi Arabia’s repeated promises to limit its use of the death penalty, the Saudi authorities have already executed 100 people this year, revealing their chilling disregard for the right to life,” Amnesty International’s Middle East and North Africa Director Heba Morayef conveyed in a statement on Friday.

Morayef pointed out: “The authorities’ relentless killing spree raises serious fears for the lives of young men on death row who were under 18 at the time of the crimes. In August alone, Saudi Arabia executed an average of four people per week.”

Image by jorono from Pixabay

According to Amnesty, in 2022, Saudi Arabia ranked third on the list of countries carrying out death sentences worldwide.

Saudi Arabia has carried out more than 1,000 executions since King Salman Bin Abdulaziz came to power in 2015, according to a joint report by Reprieve and the European-Saudi Organisation for Human Rights, published at the beginning of this year.

Sixty-nine death sentences were carried out in 2021, 27 executions in 2020 during the peak of the COVID outbreak and 187 in 2019.

At the end of last year, death sentences resumed against those convicted of drug crimes after suspending executions for about three years. Saudi Arabia has already executed two people this year for drug smuggling.

Amnesty International stated that it has: “Documented numerous cases in which the authorities have sentenced people to death for anything from a few tweets to drug-related offences, following grossly unfair trials that fell far short of international human rights standards.”

Via Middle East Monitor

This work by Middle East Monitor is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

Afghanistan has become one of the world’s worst humanitarian crises, with more than 28 million people – two-thirds of the population – in urgent need of humanitarian assistance. The United Nations has reported that four million people are acutely malnourished, including 3.2 million children under 5.

“People in Afghanistan are living a humanitarian and human rights nightmare under Taliban rule,” said Fereshta Abbasi, Afghanistan researcher at Human Rights Watch. “The Taliban leadership needs to urgently reject their abusive rules and policies, and the international community needs to hold them accountable for the current crises.”

Together with decades of war, extreme weather events, and widespread unemployment, the main causes of food insecurity since the Taliban takeover have been the harsh restrictions on women and girls’ rights. The result has been the loss of many jobs, particularly the dismissal of many women from their jobs and bans on women working for humanitarian organizations, except in limited areas. Women and girls are denied access to secondary and higher education.

On December 24, 2022, the Taliban announced a ban on women working with all local and international nongovernmental organizations, including the UN, with exemptions for health, nutrition, and education. This has severely harmed women’s livelihoods, as it is impossible to determine whether women are receiving assistance if they are not involved in the distribution and monitoring processes. The crisis has disproportionately harmed women and girls, who already have more difficulty getting access to food, health care, and housing.

45th Session of the UN Universal Periodic Review

As Saudi Arabia continues to open up internationally, it is yet again in hot water over its human rights record. The current controversy revolves around the kingdom’s increasing presence in the sporting world and accusations of “sportswashing”.

In recent years, the Saudis have thrown the heavy weight of their Public Investment Fund into partnerships with Western institutions like the PGA, Formula One racing and World Wrestling Entertainment.

Riyadh is also luring top soccer players like Cristiano Ronaldo to its national league and using Lionel Messi as an influencer to promote the kingdom.

Recently, Saudi Arabia has signalled its interest in holding women’s tennis tournaments and even potentially hosting the 2030 FIFA World Cup, as well.

While the precise dollar figure of all of these efforts is difficult to determine, it has easily reached into the billions.

‘Sportswashing’ atrocities?

But the Saudi sport blitz has been received with less enthusiasm by many outside onlookers.

Human Rights Watch and many Western commentators describe it as simple “sportswashing” – an effort to distract the world’s attention from its continual disregard for international human rights.

For instance, the kingdom has racked up a well-documented record of human rights violations during its eight-year proxy war in Yemen.

Despite Riyadh’s murky peace deal with the Houthi fighters in Yemen in April, the war will remain a stain on its humanitarian record for the foreseeable future.

The lack of any meaningful reparations following the peace deal also raises the question whether the deal was simply a way for the Saudis to disengage from the war at a time when a serious rebranding campaign was needed.

At home, political freedoms and rights remain tightly constrained by the regime. Despite moves to relax some restrictions on women and religious minorities, these reforms have paradoxically come with increasingly harsh measures towards peaceful dissidents.

Only last year, female activists Salma al-Shehab and Nourah bint Saeed al-Qahtani received prison terms of 34 years and 45 years, respectively, for their engagement with social media posts criticising the regime.

More recently, several Howeitat tribesmen were sentenced to death on terrorism charges for peacefully protesting a megacity project that threatened their ancestral village.

Building a new Saudi brand

But while obfuscating human rights issues is certainly part of the equation when it comes to the kingdom’s sports mania, its motivations are far more strategic than simple bait-and-switch tactics.

At their core, these actions fit within a broader effort outlined in the Saudi Vision 2030 campaign to rebrand the country and normalise it within the wider liberal international order.

For many outside observers, the kingdom has long been an outlier on the international stage. It’s been characterised as a primitive backwater cut off from the outside world and ruled over by a despotic monarchy that has relied on a combination of oil wealth and Islamic extremism to maintain its hold on power.

Such reductive depictions ignored a far more complex, rich and colourful history. However, few in the West were keen to explore this more nuanced viewpoint (at least if my book sales are anything to go by).

Saudi royals have historically been content with such stereotypes, too, provided they maintained their sovereignty and security at home. The kingdom made little effort with soft power initiatives outside the Islamic world.

The international art, culture and sporting worlds were seen as being in stark contrast to the psychological and cultural norms of the Wahhabi orthodoxy that has long governed Saudi public life.

This all changed in 2015, however, with the ascension of King Salman and his chosen heir, Prince Mohammad bin Salman. The younger bin Salman quickly assumed de facto control over many of the country’s key portfolios.

In contrast to his conservative predecessors, the prince was seen as a “disruptor” with little regard for tradition. Like with many of the Silicon Valley tech-bros he emulates, bin Salman likes to move fast and break things. This includes everything from traditional religious institutions to architectural rules.

Bin Salman’s vision is to remake the Saudi brand as a modern authoritarian technocracy in the mould of the United Arab Emirates or Qatar. He wants to emulate these successful case studies through economic reform, military modernisation, technological innovation, cultural modernisation and the opening of the kingdom to cosmopolitan cultural engagement and exchanges.

A new platform to engage with the world

These efforts took a hit, however, after the 2018 murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi. Bin Salman denied being personally involved in the murder, counter to what US intelligence reports concluded. But some believed the global anger of Khashoggi’s killing could have
damaged the prince’s reputation badly enough to hamper his future as a statesman.

Memories can be remarkably short-lived, though. And five years on from the killing, bin Salman’s rebranding agenda is charging ahead with increased urgency. This is where the Saudi sporting onslaught comes in, and why it needs to be understood.

Control and influence over these sports provide the kingdom with enormous cachet. Saudi Arabia can use this new stature to engage in cultural outreach with the world, influence global opinion and portray itself as modern and dynamic.

To characterise all of this as mere sportswashing may be catchy, but reduces a much broader and strategic effort.

Indeed, implicit in the notion of sportswashing is that the Saudis are suddenly concerned about the country’s association with human rights violations.

But looking at the examples of Qatar and the UAE, authoritarian regimes are able to flout international norms and laws on human rights and still fit quite comfortably within the wider liberal international order. The reason: the countries serve a valuable function in sustaining that same system.

While human rights abuses will undoubtedly continue to plague the Saudis’ efforts, bin Salman is betting big they won’t stand in the way of other states and companies engaging with an increasingly open and cosmopolitan kingdom. If history is anything to go by, he may just be right.

Ben Rich, Senior lecturer in History and International Relations, Curtin University and Leena Adel, PhD Candidate, Political Science and International Relations, Curtin University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

( Human Rights Watch ) – Two Bahraini Shi’a men have been executed in Saudi Arabia following what Amnesty International described as a “grossly unfair trial” on terrorism-related charges.

Jaafar Sultan and Sadeq Thamer were arrested in May 2015 and held incommunicado for more than three months, according to Amnesty International. The charges were related to allegations of smuggling explosives inside Saudi Arabia and participating in protests in Bahrain.

The two Bahrainis were tried and sentenced to death in Saudi’s notorious Specialized Criminal Court in October 2021 following protest-related charges that fall within the Saudi counterterrorism law.

Saudi Arabia and Bahrain, as well as other Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries, continue to use overbroad provisions contained within terrorism laws to suppress dissent and target religious minorities.

Counterterrorism laws in the GCC typically include broad, vague charges and definitions of terrorism used as catch-all provisions to punish peaceful dissidents, political activists, and human rights defenders.

Saudi Arabia’s Shi’a Muslim minority has long suffered systemic discrimination and been targeted by state-funded hate speech. On March 12, 2022, Saudi Arabian authorities executed 81 men, 41 of whom are said to belong to the Shi’a Muslim minority, under its counterterrorism law, despite promises to curtail executions.

Bahrain’s Shi’a majority also suffers from discrimination. Bahraini authorities have systematically targeted Shia clerics and have violently arrested numerous human rights defenders with Shia backgrounds, including Abdulhadi al-Khawaja in April 2011, who they sentenced to life in prison in a mass trial under Bahrain’s terrorism law.

Overly broad terrorism charges have also been exploited by other Gulf states. The United Arab Emirates (UAE) sentenced Khalaf Abdul Rahman al-Romaithi to 15 years in prison on terrorism charges following a grossly unfair trial known as the “UAE94” mass trials of 94 critics of the Emirati government. Al-Romaithi was recently extradited from Jordan to the UAE.

Human Rights Watch has documented longstanding violations of due process and fair trial rights in Saudi Arabia’s criminal justice system, making it unlikely that Sultan and Thamer received a fair trial leading up to their execution. Human Rights Watch opposes the death penalty in all countries and under all circumstances as a cruel and inhumane punishment.

Via Human Rights Watch

Under the previous Iranian Penal Code or IPC, which was in force until 2013, the charge of mohareb, “Waging War (on Islam,” was frequently used against political dissidents and people with connections to opposition groups abroad, even if they were non-violent. The new Penal Code has provided for their punishment under the vague charges of efsad-fil-arz and baghy.

“They are looking for a neck to hang.”  Those were the chilling words of Navid Afkari, a young wrestler who in September 2020 was executed in Shiraz after having been charged with killing a member of the security forces.  His dossier, like hundreds of others, remains murky to say the least.  

But executions are nothing new to Iran. 

 In the 1930’s, during the reign of Reza Shah Pahlavi, the founder of the Pahlavi dynasty, several pro-communist sympathizers and other opponents were jailed and died in prison, under suspicious circumstances among them Taghi Arani and Teymourtash.

Sardar-e-Fateh of the Bakhtiari tribe, the father of the late PM Shapur Bakhtiar, was also executed on the orders of Reza Shah. 

Under Mohammad Reza Shah, executions continued. In October 1954, Morteza Keyvan, an Iranian poet, art critic, newspaper editor and political activist of the Tudeh Party (Iran’s pro-Soviet party), was executed in Qasr prison.

In addition, 31 members of the Tudeh officers’ organization were executed.

Another notable execution at the time was that of Dr. Hossein Fatemi, Mossadegh’s 37-year-old foreign minister, who proposed the oil nationalization to Dr. M. He was executed by a firing squad in Tehran’s Qasr prison on 10 November 1954, while still suffering from the injuries of an earlier assassination attempt on him by the Fedayee-e Islam. 

Shortly thereafter, Navab Safavi, the leader of the Fedayeen Islam and one of his comrades- in -arms who had been involved in assassinations of Iran’s Prime ministers and of the famous anti-Shia writer Kasravi, were also put to death.

Many of the leaders and members of leftist and Islamist organizations who took up arms against the regime in the 1970s faced firing squads.  The numbers are not clear. But at least a few dozen met a similar fate.  Some, such as Bijan Jazani and his colleagues, were not executed but gunned down on the hills of Evin prison.

Khosrow Goleshorkh and Keramat Daneshian, both aged 30, two writers and poets, were charged with the plot of kidnapping the Shah’s son. The allegation against them was found to be fabricated.   They were both executed on 18 February 1974.

During the reign of Mohammad Reza Shah, the number of executions was high, but it never reached the level of what happened after the Revolution.   It is noteworthy that many of those who repented, led a normal life, and even got jobs in the government.  

This was not the case after the rise of the Islamic Republic. 

Now, executions were the order of the day.

Some members of the intelligentsia, or sympathizers of leftist and Islamist organizations, most notably the largest ones, (the Fedayeen and the Mojahedin) after having been released from prison, were also put to death. 

The poet Saeid Soltanpour, who had been in prison during the reign of the Shah and was released after the Revolution, was arrested on his wedding night, taken to the gallows by the IRI, and executed.  He was 41.

He has now become a legend. 

Many of the Shah’s generals and his prime minister were also executed.  Some without due process of law.  A few after facing kangaroo courts, the most notable one being the Shah’s Prime Minister Abbas Hoveyda.

Farrokh Rou Parsa, minister of education and an educated woman, met the same fate, being charged with spreading corruption on earth, a common term used by the IRI prosecutors who apply the sharia law of justice rather than generally accepted modern jusrisprudence.

Habib Elghanian, a Jewish Iranian entrepreneur who had created many industries in Iran, returned from a trip, faced execution.  He was branded as a Zionist who loved the state of Israel, yet he was a true Iranian nationalist and had done nothing wrong.  

Many members of the Bahai faith were also executed at that time.

In 1988, immediately after the end of the Iran-Iraq war, some 4,000-5,000 political prisoners who had almost completed their sentence and who were waiting to be released, were executed in Evin and Gohar Dasht prisons.  The decree came directly by Khomeini.  They were also branded as Mohareb ba Khoda (enemy of God).

This incident, which has been the subject of numerous books and films, is the single incident in the history of executions in the world when political prisoners were taken from their cells after long sentences and taken to the gallows.

The late Abbas Amir Entezam, the spokesman of the provisional government who, arrested on trumped on charges, spent 27 years in prison,  wrote:  “The worst time was when I was with other prisoners and witnessed many of my cell mates being taken and executed one-by-one, without any trials or jury. In the year 1367(1989), we were 350 people in our ward (bandeh zendan); 342 were executed; their ages ranging between 20 – 70 years.  Those were the worst days of my life. I will never forget a single moment of that pain.”  (Interview with author, Tehran, 2005). 

In September 1982, Sadeq Ghotbzadeh who had sat next to Ayatollah Khomeini on that infamous Air France flight to Tehran and Iran’s foreign minister, was executed after being falsely charged with a coup plot.  

And so, the executions continued…….

According to historian Ervand Abrahamian,  

“Whereas less than 100 political prisoners had been executed between 1971 and 1979, more than 7900 were executed between 1981 and 1985. … the prison system was centralized and drastically expanded … Prison life was drastically worse under the Islamic Republic than under the Pahlavis. In the prison literature of the Pahlavi era, the recurring words had been “boredom” and “monotony.” In that of the Islamic Republic, they were “fear,” “death,” “terror,” “horror,” and most frequent of all “nightmare” (kaboos).”

In 2010, A Kurdish teacher and poet, Farzad Kamangar, was put to death.  The IRI has been especially wary of the ethnic minorities of Iran, fearing that they might want independence from the central government.   Farzad Kamangar was 32 years old. 

Since the murder of Mahsa Amini, and after protests took place in major cities of Iran, executions have been on the rise, especially in the regions of Sistan-Baluchistan, Kurdistan and Khuzestan. 

By executing anyone whether for political reasons or murder, or for homosexuality or other “crimes,” the IRI continues to create fear in the Iranian society.    You protest, we will kill you.  You raise your voice; we will kill you.   Only on occasions when there has been outcry by the governments around the world or human rights organizations have, have we witnessed a decrease. 

Still, the IRI does not heed the international community’s outrage.  Its rulers do what they want, without fearing any repercussions.    The Shah’s regime did care about world opinion.  This has not been the case with the IRI.   In the last year alone, according to various documented and undocumented reports, nearly 245 individuals  the number could be much higher) have been executed, after engaging in protest or on trumped up charges.   The recent execution of three men, Saleh Mirhashemi, Saeed Yaghoubi and Majid Kazemi who were charged with killing members of the security forces in street fights in Isfahan (it is very hard to know the exact details) has been met with international outcry to no avail. 

Just before their death, they wrote a note from prison, “Please don’t let them kill us.” 

The Islamic regime does not move an inch to reduce any of these actions.  In fact, it has gotten bolder as Iranians behave defiantly.   Yet the very boldness of its reaction may hide a state of panic. The regime in Tehran indeed finds itself in a deep crisis, with protests in Iran calling for the fall of Khamenei and the abolition of Velayat- e -faghih.  Yet in the short run, that means more executions, especially since Ebrahim Raisi, the current President of Iran,  in the early phase of the Revolution, was a member of the execution committee and served as a warden in Evin prison.

After China, Iran is the number one executioner of our time.   It is sad and it is inconceivable that a country with so much beauty, so much culture is on record as the number two killer of its citizens.

 Can we stop this killing machine?   Yes, we can, and we must. 

( RFE/RL ) – Iran has charged 16 people, including several teenagers, in the northwestern Iranian city of Urmia for planning demonstrations and accusing them of espionage amid reports those detained gave confessions after being beaten.

In November, 25 people were arrested for allegedly having connections with “spy organizations” and “attempted to deceive and incite youth and teenagers through social networks to join protests” against the government after the death of Mahsa Amini while in police custody in September.

A group called the Detainees Followup Committee, which was set up to monitor the arrests, said on January 22 that among those detained were several teenagers — including a 15-year-old girl — and eight women.

It added that 16 of the 25 are now being prosecuted in the case, and that even though none of them knew each other before being held by police, they went through “intense pressure during interrogations.”

“None of them knew each other before and during the interrogations. They were forced to confess against each other after being beaten and threatened with rape,” the committee said.

It added that the cases were being held in the Urmia Revolutionary Court even though some in custody should be in courts set up for minors.

Public anger erupted after the September 16 death of the 22-year-old Amini, who was in custody after being detained by morality police in Tehran for “improperly” wearing a hijab.

Since Amini’s death, Iranians have flooded streets across the country to protest against a lack of rights, with women and schoolgirls making unprecedented shows of support in the biggest threat to the Islamic government since the 1979 revolution.

In response, the authorities have launched a brutal crackdown on dissent, detaining thousands and handing down stiff sentences, including the death penalty, to protesters.

Protests in Iran do not have a centralized leadership, and protest calls are planned by people and often anonymous groups on social media. The country’s leaders have blamed Western governments for the unrest.

One of the anonymous groups that has played a role in driving the protests is called “Youths of Tehran’s Neighborhoods.” Other cities have seen similar initiatives.

The role of younger Iranians in the unrest has been accompanied by reports of mass arrests of teens and heavy sentences for those convicted in adult courts.

The U.S.-based activist group HRANA quoted an informed source on January 4 as saying that the Revolutionary Court in the northern city of Sari handed down a death sentence to 18-year-old Arshia Takdastan after he was accused of throwing a bottle and a stone at a police car during a protest in the city of Nowshahr in September.

The court said Takdastan’s actions constituted “corruption on Earth,” a charge often leveled in cases allegedly involving espionage or attempts to overthrow the government and which the courts have taken to using in recent months against protesters angered over Amini’s death.

The same court sentenced to death another teenager, 19-year-old Mehdi Mohammadifard, who was arrested during the same demonstration as Takdastan. Mohammadifard’s offense was helping to organize and lead a September 21 rally in the city of Nowshahr.

Human rights groups say the crackdown has left nearly 500 people dead and hundreds more injured, in addition to the arrests.

Written by Ardeshir Tayebi based on an original story in Persian by RFE/RL’s Radio Farda

Via RFE/RL

Copyright (c)2022 RFE/RL, Inc. Used with the permission of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, 1201 Connecticut Ave NW, Ste 400, Washington DC 20036.