To step up suppression of women and
curb social uprisings, 2,000 anti-vice teams have been formed
in Gilan Province, northern Iran, to give verbal and practical
warnings to improperly veiled women. Mohammad
Abdollah-pour, commander of the Quds Corps said: “The Quds Corps of Gilan
stands alongside the Bassij and other forces to promote and revive promotion of
virtue and forbidding of vice. The issue of chastity and veiling are not an
ordinary issue, but an issue of political significance and security for the
country.”
He said some 22,000 forces from the
Bassij and Revolutionary Guard Corps of Gilan patrol, various neighborhoods in
Gilan on a weekly basis.
The commander of the State Security
Force of Gilan, Mohammad Reza Es’haqi, also announced that 28,238 improperly
veiled women had been dealt with since the beginning of this year. He said the
patrols had guided 2,321 improperly veiled women towards moral security and
obtained written commitments from them. They said legal cases had been filed
against 64 women with the Justice Department.
Hossein Rahimi, Chief of Tehran
Police, reiterated the need for Iranian women to observe the compulsory veil,
saying, “Removing the veil and improper veiling are considered among obvious
social crimes.” (The state-run ROKNA news agency – June 1, 2019) Rahimi
implicitly acknowledged that the majority of Iranian women oppose the
compulsory veil by saying, “Today, the State Security Force (SSF) deals not
with improper veiling but with those who remove the veil.”
******
Civil activist and former political
prisoner Saba Kord Afshari has been rearrested. She had been released from Evin
Prison just recently in February 2019.
Holding her arrest warrant,
security forces went to the residence of Saba Kord Afshari in Tehran on
Saturday, June 1. They inspected the house, confiscated some of her personal
belongings including her cellphone and laptop, and took her to the detention
center on Vozara Avenue.
Saba Kord Afshari’s mother said,
“After 1.5 hours of inspecting the house, they took away Saba.” The agents even
handcuffed Saba’s mother and threatened to arrest her.
Saba Kord Afshari was arrested
along with Yasamin Ariani during the protests in Tehran in early
August 2018, both of whom were sentenced to one-year prison. The two young
women were transferred from Qarchak Prison to Evin after their verdict was
issued.
******
Mrs. Massoumeh Nemati, mother of
political prisoner Atena Daemi, said she was concerned about her daughter’s
health condition as she has not been allowed to go to hospital for treatment.
Mrs. Nemati said her daughter had been summoned to court. “Unfortunately, her
lawyer was neither allowed to study her case nor even to visit her. Atena’s
lawyer was not present in the court, either and essentially, he had not been
informed of the court date. According to what Atena told me on the phone, she
had been criticized for her head covering before entering the courtroom. My
daughter said the indictment against her said according to their investigations
and testimonies of eyewitnesses, Atena Daemi and Golrokh Iraee were
incriminated and the head of Evin’s Prosecutor’s Office had asked for their
punishment. Atena was told that her letters and statements from inside prison
were the bases for her being accused of propaganda against the state. Another
charge against them is insulting the leader which has been based on an incident
in the visitation hall when she and Golrokh Iraee were singing an anthem and
chanting slogans.”
******
Women’s rights activist Nahid
Shaqaqi who is among the arrested members of Iranian Women’s Voice
Association, continues to remain under interrogation in the Intelligence
Ministry Ward 209 in Evin Prison, 16 days after her arrest.
Her brother, Kaveh
Shaqaqi, wrote in his Instagram, “My sister, Nahid Shaqaqi, is in limbo despite
passage of two weeks after her arrest. Prison authorities do not respond to my
family’s repeated inquiries. This is while Nahid’s backbone hurts. In her last
call from prison, she complained of severe pain in the backbone due to sitting
for lengthy hours under interrogation.”*****
Worker's defender activist Sepideh Gholian was transferred from Evin to notorious women's Qarchak prison.
