Three Members of Iran’s Writers Association Charged with National Security Crimes for Opposing Censorship
JANUARY
29, 2019
Three senior members of
the Iranian Writers Association (IWA) have been charged
with national security crimes for peacefully protesting state censorship
policies, according to a statement posted by the trade union
on Facebook on January 22, 2019.
IWA board members Baktash Abtin, Reza Khandan Mahabadi and Keyvan Bajan were
charged with “propaganda against the state,” “assembly and collusion against
national security” and “encouraging women into corruption and prostitution” for
allegedly printing declarations and internal publications opposing the
censorship of art and literature in Iran, said the statement.
Mahabadi and Abtin were
released from Tehran’s Evin Prison on January 27 and 28 respectively after
being detained on January 22. During their detention, they were denied access
to counsel and only released after posting bail set at one billon tomans (approximately
$237,000 USD at the time) set by Judge Mohammad Moghiseh of Branch 28 of the
Revolutionary Court in Tehran.
Bajan is also expected to post
bail “in the next few days,” Mahabadi told the Center for Human Rights in Iran
(CHRI) after he was released.
“The detained IWA members asked
for time to get a lawyer and exercise their right to defense but Judge Moghiseh
said they were capable of defending themselves and effectively rejected their
right to have a lawyer,” said the IWA statement.
“Then he raised the bail amount
for each one of them from 100 million tomans to a billion tomans. Unable to
post bail, the IWA members were taken into custody and transferred to Evin
Prison,” added the statement.
Abtin, Mahabadi and Bajan were
initially accused of printing internal documents and publications without a
permit in the spring of 2015 and charged with “propaganda against the state”
based on a complaint from the Intelligence Ministry, which operates under
President Hassan Rouhani.
At the time, Baktash was detained
for several days while Mahabadi and Bajan were summoned for questioning before
they were all charged.
Three years later, Judge
Moghiseh added two more charges to their open cases: “assembly and collusion
against national security” and “encouraging women to corruption and
prostitution” for allegedly publishing an IWA statement that criticized
security forces for arresting citizens who have peacefully protested the
state’s compulsory hijab law.
“I would like to emphasize that
these pressures have been brought on by the security and judicial agencies,”
Mahabadi told CHRI in June 2018.
“But the imprisonments,
beatings and intimidations will not deter me or my colleagues from defending
freedom of speech and seeking the truth and punishment of those responsible for
the chain murders,” he added.
In June 2018, Abtin, a poet and
filmmaker, was sentenced to three months of
community service to be performed for the State Welfare Organization of Iran
and five million tomans ($1,182 USD) for posting a photo of a man injured by
police on his Instagram account.
The IWA, an independent group
of authors, poets, editors and translators based in Iran was formed in May 1968
to fight against state censorship.
Governments before and after
Iran’s 1979 revolution have persecuted its members.
In 1998, writer Majid Sharif,
opposition politician Dariush Forouhar, his wife Parvaneh Eskandari and writers Mohammad
Mokhtari and Mohammad Jafar Pouyandeh—all IWA members—were murdered in cold
blood.
An investigation by President
Mohammad Khatami’s reformist government concluded that the murders had been
carried out by “rogue elements in the Intelligence Ministry,” forcing the
minister in charge, Ghorbanali Dorri Najafabadi, to resign.
Top ministry officials Saeed
Eslami (Emami), Mostafa Kazemi and Mehrdad Alikhani were also arrested, and
information about the murders was leaked to the media.
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