The Guardian view on detained journalists in Iran

The arrest of the Washington Post’s Tehran correspondent Jason Rezaian and his journalist wife, Yeganeh Salehi, as well as a photographer and her partner, is a brutal reminder of the distance between President Hassan Rouhani’s reforming promises and his willingness to act. His silence on this arrest, which took place over a week ago on 22 July, is turning the affair into a public test of the president’s ambition to usher in the more liberal era he promised barely a year ago, and his readiness to resist the determination of the conservative judiciary and ultimately Ayatollah Khamenei to block him. If he does not speak out in defence of Mr Rezaian, his wife and colleagues, it will be a damaging blow to confidence in his capacity to deliver – particularly in the US.

Tehran’s shameful approach to independent journalism goes back a long way. The shah ran a notoriously repressive regime for years before he was overthrown in 1979. The revolution promised a golden dawn, a time when the notorious Evin prison would be redundant and become a museum. But although under the ayatollahs there have been fleeting moments of optimism, there have also been long periods of repression.

President Rouhani, anxious to engage with the west, seemed to hold out a real promise of change and in particular an end to the clampdown on journalists which had been precipitated by the violent protests that followed 2009’s stolen election. The release, a month after he took office in August last year, of several activists and the human rights lawyer Nasrin Sotoudeh raised hopes the promise might be fulfilled. But within six months, reports were emerging that journalists and other prisoners were being beaten up, as Evin once again became the scene of violence and degradation. There are now more than 30 journalists in jail, and another 30 bloggers. Journalists’ defence organisations have Iran high on their lists of offenders. The Iranian journalists’ association has been banned since 2009. Journalists are still routinely imprisoned without trial on charges so vague they are almost impossible to refute. Several women journalists have just been imprisoned. One, Marzieh Rasouli, has been sentenced to 50 lashes for disturbing the public order. Another, Saba Azarpeik, has been held incommunicado for two months.

As President Rouhani well knows, this is no way to govern a major regional power concerned to build a new relationship with the west. Mr Rezaian, who has joint US-Iranian citizenship, went to Iran in 2012, one of the few western journalists given permission to work there, to send home a more nuanced account of life in the country. His detention, and that of his wife and colleagues, is a breach of the journalistic freedom President Rouhani’s new Iran should be upholding.

The Guardian