Human Rights Defenders Center Award Presented to Family of Mohammad Najafi, Imprisoned Lawyer
The Human Rights Defenders Center presented its “Human Rights Advocate” award for 1398 (2019) to Mohammad Najafi, a lawyer and imprisoned human rights activist.
The Human Rights Defenders Center’s Telegram channel announced on Thursday, December 21, that Seyyed Mohammad Seifzadeh, Abdolfattah Soltani, and Massoumeh Dehghan, as representatives of the Center, presented the award statue to Mr. Najafi’s family at his residence in Arak, the city where he is imprisoned.
According to the report, these representatives, wishing for Mohammad Najafi’s freedom, praised committed lawyers like him who, despite the heavy pressures of recent years on the legal profession, refused to abandon their professional responsibilities.
Since 1386 (2007), the Human Rights Defenders Center has annually selected one human rights advocate as the winner of the “Human Rights Advocate” award and presents the statue of Cyrus the Great Charter on International Human Rights Day (December 10) to these winners.
Recently, the Council of Bars and Law Societies of Europe also presented its 2019 Human Rights Award to this lawyer, as well as to Nasrin Sotoudeh, Abdolfattah Soltani, and Amir Salar Davoudi.
This lawyer was released on April 29 of this year through a “pardon” while serving his three-year prison sentence in Arak Prison. However, just four days after his release, he was transferred to Arak Central Prison to serve his ten-year prison sentence related to the December 2017 events and charged with “cooperation with hostile states.”
The U.S. State Department has repeatedly and in various instances condemned violent measures and widespread suppression of protesters and human rights activists in Iran, as well as the repeated and continuous violation of Iranian citizens’ rights by the regime ruling that country.
Source: Voice of America
