Press Freedom Violations Recounted in Real Time (from 1st January 2012)
03.04.2012- Wave of arrests and convictions of journalists undiminished in Iran
Reporters Without Borders learned on 30 June of the arrest on of Mohammad Solimaninya, head of the social networking site u24, after he was summoned to Tehran’s Evin prison.
The netizen had been previously arrested on 10 January this year then released on bail on 22 May on payment of a bond of 40 million tomans (about 4,500 euros).
On 22 June, we received word of the arrest of the journalist Poya Dabiri Mehr who runs the blog Andishe Poys. The reasons for his arrest and where he was being held were not known. The journalist, who is close to the government of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, may have been the victim of high-level rivalry between supporters of the president and those of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
On 9 June, lawyer Farideh Gheirat was informed that his client, the feminist journalist Noushin Ahmadi Khorasani, had been handed a one-year suspended prison sentence by the 26th chamber of the Tehran revolutionary court. She is the founder of the Feminist School website and co-organizer of the “One Million Signatures for Equality” campaign calling for the reform of laws that discriminate against women.
Since early March, just before International Women’s Day, the government has stepped up pressure ononline feminists such as Khorasani, who are regularly the target of threats and arrests.
The journalist Bahman Ahamadi Amoee, who had been held in Evin prison since 20 June 2009, was transferred on 12 June to Rajai Shahr jail in the northern town of Karaj after he took part in a ceremony organized by prisoners in an Evin prison dormitory in memory of the journalist and writer Hoda Saber, who died on 12 June after a hunger strike.
Rajai Shahr is regarded as one of Iran’s harshest prisons because of its high number of cases of torture, rape and murder. Since his arrest, the journalist has been subjected to constant harassment by the judicial authorities. He appeared before the Tehran revolutionary court on 25 June and was placed in solitary confinement.