Update on Persecuted Labor Activists

Ayat Niafar, the spokesperson for the Follow-up Committee to Form Workers Organizations in Iran was arrested on October 17 and taken to the Evin prison. Two other fellow labor activists, Behnam Ebrahimzadeh and Shahrokh Zamani have each received five and eleven year jail sentences respectively.

Mohammad Jarrahi has also received a five year sentence.

Ebrahimzadeh was sentenced to 20 years in jail earlier which was commuted to “five years with lashes” on October 29. He is serving his term in the ward number 350 of the notorious Evin prison.

Kourosh Bakhshandeh, labor activist from Kurdistan, has been sentenced to a one year jail term in absentia. Bakhshandeh was arrested on August 27 at his home and released on September 20 on the equivalent of 75 thousand dollars bail. He was sentenced in absentia to one year in prison to be effective within five years. He was sentenced for membership in the group “Coordination Committee to Form Labor Organizations” and for “propagation against the system through maintaining contacts with illegal groups”.

Seven members of the Coordinating Committee to Form Labor Organizations, Rahman Ebrahimzadeh, Abbas Hashempour, Rahman Tanha, Fattah Soleimani, Hossein Pirouti, Isa Ebrahimzadeh, and Samad Ahmadpour, who were arrested in March 2010 were acquitted of their charges. Salam Ghaderi, another member of the Coordinating Committee, was released from prison on October 16 after served his jail term.

Davoud Razavi, a member of the board of Tehran and Suburbs Vahed Bus Workers Syndicate, summoned by the sixth branch of the Evin prison prosecutors office, appeared at the said office on October 24. The summons related to a 2006 case involving the Syndicate accounts and its newsletter. He was notified that the charges had been dropped.

Reports indicate that Reza Shahabi, the incarcerated treasurer of the Vahed Syndicate, has written a letter to Abbas Jafari Dolatabadi, Tehran prosecutor general asking for the reasons for his continued detention. In his letter, Shahabi has asked the prosecutor to provide the legal grounds for his continued arrest despite the earlier posting of his bail. He has asked for his acquittal given lack of sufficient evidence on the indicted charges.

Afshin Osanloo, brother of Mansour Osanloo, has been in jail for the past 11 months. He was sentenced to five years in jail last May.

Ebrahim Madadi, the deputy head of the Vahed Bus Workers Syndicate is still serving his three and a half year term in prison for “actions against national security”.

Rasul Bodaghi, a teachers union activist, has spent 788 days in jail without the possibility of parole. Of this, several months were spent in solitary confinement. He has also been expelled from the Education Ministry and lost his salary.

Source: Iran Labor Report