Iran charges environmental activists with spying: Report
ERBIL (Kurdistan 24) – A major human rights group said on Friday that Iran should immediately release eight environmental activists detained for six months unless authorities charge them with recognizable crimes and produce evidence to justify the continued detention.
In an open letter addressed to senior Iranian officials released on Tuesday, the families of the environmentalists said their loved ones were being held in Tehran’s infamous Evin prison without access to a lawyer and asked authorities to visit these detainees to hear the circumstances of their detention.
“Six months on, the Iranian authorities still haven’t provided a shred of evidence to justify locking up these environmentalists,” said Sarah Leah Whitson, Middle East director at Human Rights Watch.
“The authorities should be praising these activists for addressing Iran’s dire environmental problems, but the country’s hard-line security institutions rarely miss an opportunity to punish independent civic initiative.”
Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) intelligence organization has arrested at least 50 environmental activists across the country since January 2018, accusing them of spying.
On January 24 and 25, the IRGC agents arrested several members of a local environmental group, the Persian Wildlife Heritage Foundation, accusing them of using environmental projects as a cover to collect classified strategic information.
“It is unclear what classified strategic information these individuals could potentially collect,” the HRW report said, “as the foundation works to conserve and protect Iran’s flora and fauna, including the Asiatic Cheetah, an endangered species found in the country.”
In February, the family of Kavous Seyed-Emami, a well-known environmentalist and professor arrested as part of the crackdown, reported he had died in detention under unknown circumstances. Iranian authorities have claimed he had committed suicide.
During the following month, Issa Kalantari, head of Iran’s Environmental Institution, said during a speech at a bio-diversity conference that the government had formed a committee consisting of the ministers of intelligence, interior, and justice and the president’s legal deputy, and that they had concluded there was no evidence to suggest those detained are spies and that they should be released.
Said Whitson, “The country is facing serious economic and environmental challenges, but authorities are throwing the very people who could be part of the solution in jail.”
Editing by John J. Catherine