Student Activists Targeted by Islamic Republic’s Repression Machine

The Islamic Republic’s repression machine has been targeting students for decades, and now coinciding with the forty-second anniversary of the 1979 revolution, news emerges of the conviction of two more students. A revolution whose slogans included freedom for Iran and Iranians, but in practice imprisoned those who sought freedom.

Students who are imprisoned for the slightest criticism or smallest protest.

Like Parisa Rafiee, who even in prison has had a new case opened against her and been sentenced to additional imprisonment—15 months in prison on charges of “propaganda against the system” because after her temporary release from detention, she wrote about the conditions in the detention center and what women prisoners endure.

Parisa Rafiee is a Tehran University student who was in detention for three weeks in winter 2017.

In her first case, she was sentenced to seven years in prison and 74 lashes for participating in student protests, a sentence that was ultimately reduced to one year imprisonment, and she has been serving this sentence in Evin Prison since June of this year.

But now in her new case, an additional 15 months of imprisonment has been added to that sentence.

Saha Mortazaei is another student activist who has been sentenced to prison—solely because she staged a sit-in on the Tehran University campus, because she sat on a desk and held a placard on which she had written about “discrimination and injustice” against herself due to her expulsion from studies.

Saha Mortazaei, a graduate in the field of political science and international relations, has been barred from pursuing a doctoral degree.

For protesting this matter, she was charged at Branch 15 of the Tehran Revolutionary Court under the presidency of Judge Soleimani with “assembly and conspiracy against national security” and sentenced to six years in prison.

And now this sentence has been upheld in the Tehran Province Court of Appeal and communicated to her lawyer.

It has been ten months since the arrest of Ali Yoonesi and Amirhossein Moradi, two outstanding students at Sharif University of Technology, and these two students remain in an uncertain situation in Evin Prison.

Iran’s judiciary has accused them of connections with the Mujahedin-e Khalq Organization and possession of explosive materials—accusations that families reject.

Nazanin Mohammadnejad is another student activist who was in detention for two months and was temporarily released last week with a heavy bail of 1 billion and 200 million tomans.

There are many names—students who have been arrested this year or sentenced to prison, on repetitive charges that are all based on these individuals’ student activities or civil protests.

Shahab-al-Din Nazari, Mohammad Khani, Kamiar Zouqi, Mohammad Shabahati, Raghieh Nafari, Mohammad Davari, Mostafa Hashemizadeh, Amirhossein Sharifi, and Abolfattah Nejadfattah are just the names of a few students who over the past year have been arrested and sentenced to imprisonment across Iran.

The reason for the arrest and conviction of these individuals has been their student activities or their cries for justice for the 176 victims whose airplane was shot down in the Tehran sky by Revolutionary Guard missiles into thousands of pieces, and also support for people who in the bloody November of 2019 received bullets and death in response to their protests.

Events that made 2019 a year full of breathtaking news, but the perpetrators and instigators of those atrocities have still not been identified and tried in any of these cases.

And meanwhile, the security and judicial apparatuses of the Islamic Republic did not hesitate for a moment to suppress those who protested those events, and from autumn 2019 until now have arrested and imprisoned dozens solely for their demands for transparency and implementation of justice.

Source: Radio Farda