Over 26 human rights organizations, together with the Kurdistan Human Rights Community and Centre for Human Rights in Iran, issued a joint statement on Tuesday calling for the speedy revocation of the loss of life sentence imposed on Kurdish girls’s socio-political activist Pakhshan Azizi. This sentence, handed down by the Iranian judiciary, has sparked worldwide outrage, with the organizations calling it “a blatant violation of human rights ideas and requirements in addition to worldwide conventions and treaties.”
Azizi, 40, was arrested by Iran’s Ministry of Intelligence in Tehran and subsequently transferred to Evin Prison’s Ward 209, a infamous facility recognized for housing political prisoners. She was held in solitary confinement for months, throughout which era she was allegedly subjected to torture, each bodily and psychological, to coerce confessions. In July 2024, the Islamic Revolutionary Courtroom in Tehran sentenced her to loss of life on expenses of “armed revolt” and “membership of opposition teams.”
Her legal professionals have maintained that Azizi has no involvement in any armed teams, emphasising that she spent years working in refugee camps in Syria’s Rojava area, offering humanitarian support to these displaced by ISIS violence. They additional argue that her arrest, detention, and trial had been marred by extreme violations of due course of, pointing to the pressured confessions extracted beneath duress as proof that the costs towards her are fabricated.
Azizi’s case is just not distinctive however a part of a broader sample in Iran, the place political dissidents, significantly from marginalised ethnic groups just like the Kurds, are steadily focused for his or her political activism.
The rights organizations’ assertion was unequivocal in its condemnation:
We strongly condemn the issuance of the Iranian judiciary’s loss of life sentence for Pakhshan Azizi, a Kurdish lady activist and social support employee. This sentence is just not solely a blatant violation of human rights ideas and requirements, however it’s also a transparent manifestation of the systematic repression of freedom of expression and the appropriate to life within the Islamic Republic of Iran.
The joint assertion additionally appealed to the broader worldwide neighborhood to intervene:
We urge the United Nations, governments world wide, and human rights organizations to take speedy and efficient motion … The worldwide neighborhood ought to use all authorized, political, and diplomatic mechanisms to stop the issuance and execution of such inhumane sentences by Iran’s judiciary.
Whereas there’s potential for Iran to face diplomatic stress, Iran’s management has traditionally proven a reluctance to reply to exterior stress, significantly on points it frames as issues of inside safety.
Source / Picture: jurist.org
