Iran's Hardline Media Slams London Tribunal As 'British Stunt'

Mosaed received his award Thursday at a ceremony in New York City after one year's delay now that he is safely out of Iran and living in the US, which CPJ says has played a “powerful role…historically in supporting press freedom around the world.”

In a video-taped speech, Mosaed identified "just a few examples of the countless sufferings of Iranians” in missiles shooting down a Ukrainian passenger plane in 2020; the killing of hundreds of protesters in 2019; economic crisis and corruption; and Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei ruling against the import of US- and British-made vaccines.

"The crucial point about each of these catastrophes is that we were never properly made aware of their dimensions," Mosaed said. "Speaking the truth is dangerous in my country because the government fears not only the truth itself but also the audacity behind telling the truth and this has turned speaking the truth into a crime in my country."

Mosaed was unable to receive his award last year as he had fled to Turkey to seek asylum.He was detained by Turkish authorities in January and faced the possibility of extradition to Iran.

"At that time he was in danger and could not speak to us openly," Yeganeh Rezaian (Salehi), an Iranian journalist who has worked for Bloomberg and the Abu-Dhabi owned National newspaper. Rezaian was arrested along with her American-Iranian journalist husband Jason Rezaian in 2014 and spent months in Evin prison, Tehran.

"Being summoned to serve more than four years in prison for the crime of exposing financial corruption, Mohammad fled Iran for neighboring Turkey,” she told ICJ. “There he faced the prospect of being sent back. Thanks to CPJ and others, Mohammad is safe.”

In his speech Mosaed criticized the Iranian government for "increasingly cracking down on domestic and foreign journalists, by expelling, exiling, persecution of their families, and widespread propaganda."

Mosaed was arrested in 2019 after posts on Twitter about an internet shutdown. “Knock Even! Hello Free World!" he tweeted in English, adding that he had used 42 different proxies to find a way to post. "Millions of Iranians don't have the internet. Can you hear us?”

He was then released and subsequently detained after he had criticized the government over management of the Covid pandemic. In September 2020 Mosaed was sentenced by a Revolutionary Court to four years and nine months in prison on security and propaganda charges, and banned from journalism and using communications devices for two years.

Saeed Khatibzadeh, the foreign ministry spokesman, said Thursday that the resolution by the General Assembly's Third Committee was "based on weak and scattered international votes" and alleged that many countries voting in favor had been subject to "various political pressures and threats".

The spokesman called on Canada to accept responsibility for its complicity in Israeli “crimes against humanity against the Palestinian people.”

Iran often responds to allegations of human rights abuse by claiming the double standards of the accuser. When asked in June about his role in the 1988 prison executions in Iran, President Ebrahim Raisi (Raeesi) accused the Mujahideen-e Khalq of violence, the opposition group whose members made up the bulk of those executed in 1988.

Human Rights Watch recently said the Canadian government, which refuses to accept the International Criminal Court considering alleged Israel crimes in occupied territory, supported “draconian military rule over Palestinians in the occupied West Bank.”

The resolution by UN Thrid Committee on Iran expressed concern at the “alarmingly high frequency" of the imposition and carrying-out of the death penalty, including executions based on forced confessions or for crimes that do not qualify as the most serious crimes, were overly broad or vaguely defined. It passed at the UN General Assembly committee Wednesday 79-32, with 64 abstentions. The Iranian representative successfully requested a recorded vote.

The General Assembly allocates to its Social, Humanitarian and Cultural Affairs Committee, commonly referred to as the "Third Committee", agenda items relating to a range of social, humanitarian affairs and human rights issues that affect people all over the world.

The MEK immediately called for “the clerical regime, including [Supreme Leader] Ali Khamenei, Ebrahim Raisi, and Gholam-Hossain Mohseni Ejeii [the judiciary chief],” to be “prosecuted by international tribunals.”

Torture and cruel treatment

The resolution expressed serious concern at the imposition of the death penalty against those under 18 at the time of the offence. "Torture or other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment," which the resolution said could include sexual violence, were also highlighted.

The resolution called for the release of anyone detained for exercising human rights and fundamental freedoms, including anyone detained solely over peaceful protests, including any in November 2019 and January 2020.

Iran was urged to "end reprisals against human rights defenders, peaceful protesters and their families, journalists and media workers covering the protests, and individuals who cooperate or attempt to cooperate with the United Nations human rights mechanisms."

Truth and reconciliation

Zahra Ershadi, Iran's ambassador and deputy permanent representative to the United Nations, in a statement read to the UN Third Committee, called the resolution "insincere and indefensible political." She said it “replete with factual errors…and unmasks the deliberate hostile policy of incitement to Iranophobia.”

Ershadi accused Canada of genocide over the 215 bodies of indigenous children unearthed in May at one of Canada’s largest residential schools for native Canadians and in its policies of forced assimilation. She said the wider West has been remained silent.

Canada’s delegate at the UN assembly said Wednesdaythat Canada has established a Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said Canadians were "horrified and ashamed" at how Canada had behaved and promised remedial action. A Canadian federal court in September upheld a 2016 ruling ordering the government to compensate indigenous children forced into foster care.

Straw said the only possible obstacle to paying the debt was potential United States sanctions, which threaten punitive action against any third party dealing with Iran’s financial sector. But Straw suggested this was unlikely given past US behavior in similar circumstances.

“When there was previously a Democrat [Party] government in power in Washington, and John Kerry was the secretary of state, he arranged for about $2 billion to be paid to the Iranian government – [money] the US owed - the money was put on a plane,” Straw said. “The United States are not going to make a fuss about us paying a debt, if necessary in a similar way.”

On the same day, in January 2016, that the US flew to Tehran $1.7 billion it owed Iran, the Iranian authorities released four Americans, including Jason Rezaian, an Iranian-American journalist arrested in July 2014. Washington also freed seven Iranians held over alleged sanctions violations.

Straw said he was convinced that “from time to time the Islamic Republic of Iran has engaged in what amounts to hostage taking” and that while he could not be certain, he assumed this was the case with Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe detained in Iran since 2016.

Straw has been a proponent of improving ties with Iran, arguing that the regime in Tehran is not the revolutionary government of 40 years ago and diplomacy can work to change its policies.

But the former foreign secretary insisted that, nonetheless, the money was owed: “If we pay, it will not create any further difficulties for Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe and may very well ease her circumstances of release.”

International arbitration ruled in 2001 that London should repay money given by Iran for military hardware that was never delivered.

‘Complicated’ relations

Straw noted that Britain’s relationship with Iran was “complicated,” and had been so before the 1979 Revolution. While he said Britain had on occasions handled Zeghari-Ratcliffe’s case poorly – he cited Boris Johnson’s 2017 statement to a parliamentary committee that she was in Iran training journalists – the situation needed “very careful diplomacy” and that “shouting at them, or as some people have said, breaking off diplomatic relations, is going to get us absolutely nowhere.”

Straw said he shared the frustration of Richard Ratcliffe, who is in hospital for tests after a 21-day hunger strike outside the British foreign office in London to draw attention to the plight of his wife.

The issue of paying the £400 million ($540 million) debt is controversial in British politics, with Ratcliffe alleging his wife is forbidden from leaving Iran, effectively held ‘hostage,’ to pressure London to pay.

Taking ‘hostages’

While Straw has earlier argued that Britain should pay, others, including many within the ruling Conservative Party, oppose the move, arguing it would encourage Iran to take other hostages. An ex-detainee in Iran, theAustralian-British academic Kylie Moore-Gilbert, said Wednesday that the British government should repay the £400 million only in the form of “humanitarian aid.”

In a debate Tuesday in the British parliament Jeremy Hunt, a former Conservative foreign minister, said the UK should immediately pay “if necessary, by getting an RAF [British air force] plane to fly gold to Tehran.”

Zaghari-Ratcliffe, a project manager for Thomson Reuters Foundation, was arrested in 2016, convicted without a fair trial of working to overthrow the government and sentenced to five years jail. After being paroled early in 2020, she was charged with new offences and has been refused permission to leave the country. Other British citizens held in Iran are dual-nationals Anoosheh Ashoori, a businessman, and labor activist Mehran Raoof.

Mohammadi called her husband, who lives in France, from Evin prison telling him that she was in solitary confinement. Rahman wrote later in a Twitter post that the line had been cut when Mohammadi insisted that she would not allow the lashing.

According to the Human Rights Activists News Agency (HRANA), Mohammadi was arrested Tuesday at a death anniversary ceremony at a cemetery in Karaj, west of Tehran, for Ebrahim Ketabdar, shot dead by security forces during 2019 protests, reportedly while shopping.

In a video posted to Twitter, Ketabdar's mother claimed security beat Mohammadi, dragged her into their vehicle and took her away. Another video posted on Twitter showed her protesting to the security forces over Mohammadi’s arrest amid chants of "Down with the Dictator."

Solitary cell

Former political prisoner Arash Sadeghi in a tweet Wednesday said Mohammadi was being held in “a solitary cell in a ward run by the Revolutionary Guards.”

"Narges Mohammadi and Atena Daemi's [an anti-capital punishment campaigner] sentencing to lashes is for their protest against people's massacre in November 2019,” Sadeghi tweeted. “Let's not remain silent against this inhumane sentence.”

The outstanding convictions date to July, when Mohammadi was convicted on charges of "propaganda against the Islamic Republic" for issuing a statement against the death penalty and "disobeying the prison governor and authorities." Mohammadi claimed this resulted from what she claimed was a prison governor's inappropriate behavior that amounted to sexual harassment.

Mohammadi refused to attend her trial in March having said in an open letter the previous month that she would refuse to accept any sentence passed by the court. She then refused a summons to serve the sentence in September.

Cofounder and chair of the Defenders of Human Rights Center, Mohammadi has been to jail several times over the past two decades. She was freed from Evin September 2020 after serving five and half years when she had no contact with her husband and children for long stretches.

She was detained twice before this year, once for participating in a rally in front of the interior ministry during week-long water protests in Khuzestan and again at an anti-Taliban rally outside the Pakistan embassy in Tehran in September. She was freed both times after a few hours.

Paying the debt – due over Britain’s failure to supply military hardware sold to Iran in the 1970s – has become controversial in British politics. Richard Ratcliffe alleges his wife Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe is forbidden from leaving Iran to pressure London to pay, and while some politicians and clerics argue Britain should do so, others, notably on the right wing of the ruling Conservative Party, argue it should not.

In a series of tweets Wednesday, Moore-Gilbert, a lecturer in Islamic Studies at Melbourne University exchanged by Iran last year in a prisoner swap with three Iranian prisoners in Thailand two of whom had been convicted in connection with a bombing plot in Bangkok in 2012, said the UK should not pay the debt but rather decide itself in what form to transfer “humanitarian aid” to Iran.

Tehran won its case over the debt in international arbitration in 2001, but the UK has sat on the money ever since.

"An international court of arbitration has ruled that this debt must be paid," Moore-Gilbert wrote. “But to the Iranian government, not the IRGC [Revolutionary Guards]. “It is the Iranian people's money, and should go to the Iranian people, who are suffering greatly from economic catastrophe and the disastrous impact of Covid.”

RAF plane to Iran

The academic seized on a statement by Jeremy Hunt, former British foreign minister, in Tuesday’s parliamentary debate on the Zaghari-Ratcliffe case, that the UK should immediately pay “if necessary, by getting an RAF [British air force] plane to fly gold to Tehran.”

"Is anyone in any doubt where this gold will end up? Who it will benefit?" Moore-Gilbert tweeted. "What is certain is that £400m will only incentivise the IRGC to take more hostages."

Moore-Gilbert wrote that Zaghari-Ratcliffe, a project manager for Thomson Reuters Foundation, was a hostage, as were other dual citizens including British-Iranian businessman Anoosheh Ashoori and labor activist Mehran Raoof, American-Iranian environmentalist Morad Tahbaz, journalist Jason Rezaian, and Australian backpackers Jolie King and Mark Firkin. Rezaian, King and Firkin have all been released: the backpackers were held for a few months after reportedly flying an unlicensed drone.

Sadiq Khan, London mayor, and Tulip Siddiq, Zaghari-Ratcliffe's member of parliament, in a joint statement before the parliamentary debate said that Prime Minister Boris Johnsonshould take “stronger action” over Zaghari-Ratcliffe: “We believe that this innocent woman has suffered enough. Though responsibility for Nazanin’s predicament lies with Iran, there is more that the UK Government could be doing to help her, and we are making a personal plea to the Prime Minister to take stronger action to try to bring her home.”

Zaghari-Ratcliffe, now 42, was arrested in 2016, convicted in a trial without due process of law of working to overthrow the government and sentenced to five years imprisonment. After being paroled early in 2020, she was charged with new offences and has been refused permission to leave the country.

UN experts and human rights organizations have said Iran imprisons foreigners and dual nationals to use them as bargaining chips against other countries.

Ratcliffe, her husband, has just ended a three-week hunger strike outside the UK Foreign Office. Ratcliffe listened to parliamentary debate Tuesday afternoon from hospital where he is undergoing checks and treatment after his fast.