Amnesty urges Iran to release Kurdish prisoner, give medical care

LONDON, United Kingdom (Kurdistan24) – Amnesty International (AI) warned Iran about the health of a Kurdish prisoner hostage who was denied urgent medical care.

Zeynab Jalalian, a 34-year-old political activist, working to “empower Iran’s ethnic minority Kurds, particularly women,” was arrested in 2008, received an unfair trial, and was convicted only based on her “confessions,” AI reported.

“Before her trial, she was held in a cell on her own for eight months. During this time…she was flogged on the soles of her feet, and her head was repeatedly rammed against a wall, fracturing her skull and causing bleeding in the brain,” AI said.

In a report published in July, “Health taken hostage: Cruel denial of medical care in Iran’s prisons,” AI documented that in many cases Iran intentionally abused ailing political prisoners and prisoners of conscious. 

The report stated Iran denied medical care to deliberately and cruelly “intimidate, punish or humiliate political prisoners, or to extract forced ‘confessions’ or statements of ‘repentance’ from them.”

Moreover, the United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detention (WGAD) announced in a statement in June that Iran had arbitrarily detained Kurdish political prisoner Jalalian.

“The Working Group urges the [Iranian] Government to ensure that Ms. Jalalian is not subjected to further torture or ill-treatment,” the statement read.

“The Working Group also urges the Government to fully investigate the circumstances surrounding her arbitrary deprivation of liberty, and to take appropriate measures against those responsible for the violation of her rights,” the statement continued.

Also in April, Ahmad Shaheed, the UN Special Rapporteur on the Situation of Human Rights in the Islamic Republic of Iran, and other experts, discussed Iran’s human rights violations.

Jalalian was engaged in social and political activism, in particular assisting Kurdish women by providing education and social services in Iran and Iraq.

She previously visited an Iranian girls’ high school where she delivered a speech about women’s rights.

On or around March 10, 2008, Jalalian was traveling on a bus from Kermanshah to Sanandaj when she was arrested by four armed Iranian intelligence security officers at Ghazanchi inspection post near Kamyaran.