“Vida Rabani”: By What Right Does the Judiciary Trample on Doctor-Patient Confidentiality

“Vida Rabani” released a protest letter from Evin Prison questioning by what right the judiciary tramples on doctor-patient confidentiality.

Vida Rabani, born in 1968, is an Iranian journalist and political activist who was sentenced to 6 years in prison on charges of “gathering and conspiracy against national security” and to fifteen months imprisonment on charges of “propaganda against the system.” She has been serving her sentence in Evin Prison since 2019.

Vida Rabani reacted to statements by the Judiciary’s news agency regarding her use of psychiatric medications. By releasing a letter, she reported on the lack of proper medical care for prisoners in Evin Prison and the indiscriminate distribution of tranquilizers, writing: “Nervous and psychological illnesses like mine are the result of your arrest, solitary confinement, and torture. By what right and with what nerve do security and judicial authorities allow themselves to violate doctor-patient confidentiality and how is a history of psychiatric illness related to a headache at all?”

Ms. Rabani, while protesting the judiciary’s statements about her history of psychiatric illness, said: “Since you mentioned that she has a history of psychiatric illness, you could have also added that this history started from March 2020 after the bloody November uprising and threats from IRGC intelligence, after the plane crash and the Amir Kabir gathering and my arrest by the Ministry of Intelligence. Over four years, you arrested me four times at my home, such that every doorbell would startle me. You have summoned me repeatedly and repeatedly ripped my door from its hinges and repeatedly threatened me by phone.

You kept me in solitary confinement and left me in detention for dozens of days without any interrogation because you know how damaging and invisible torture solitary confinement, uncertainty, and not knowing are. For you, detention is a method to pressure and torture the accused, not for investigation. When you kept me for 40 days in detention facility 209, I was interrogated for a total of only three hours. You were not even willing to transfer me to the general ward until I went on a hunger strike. I am not ashamed to say that my mind has been damaged and I take anti-anxiety and antidepressant medications. This is not shameful. It is the apparatus and system that has been designed to inflict these damages on the minds of its opponents that should be ashamed, yet it is not.”