Iranian Lawyers Protest Move To Further Limit Bar Associations

Mowlavi Fat’hi-Mohammad Naghshbandi, the Friday prayer leader of the city of Rask, was arrested earlier in the week, leading to several days of demonstrations and a heavy security presence by regime agents.

According to the advocacy group Haalvsh, which reports on issues affecting the Baluch people in the predominantly Sunni province, intelligence agents and Revolutionary Guard in collaboration with officials from the Chabahar Oil Company, asked the Sunni leader over the phone to come to Chabahar to resolve problems regarding his fuel rationing. After Naghshbandi set off for Chabahar along with his son and several others, they were pursued by security forces and subsequently detained along the way.

The detention of Mowlavi Naghshbandi has struck a chord with the local population, prompting them to take to the streets in a display of unity and solidarity. He is accused of "disturbing public opinion through false speeches, slander, and defamation against the Islamic Republic, acting against national security, and illegal occupation of national lands."

The intensified security atmosphere did not stop the weekly protests in the province, which were held regularly in the past 47 weeks, since Bloody Friday on September 30, 2022, when security forces killed more than 80 people, including women and children.

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This Friday, in addition to the provincial capital Zahedan, people held demonstrations in several other cities such as Rask, Khash, Sarbaaz, Dashtiari, Sib and Suran, demanding the release of Naghshbandi as well as other political prisoners. Local media reported that protesters in various cities blocked key routes by setting car tires ablaze in a dramatic display of dissent. 

The heightened protests signify mounting frustration in the region, which has long experienced economic and social hardships as well as discrimination agonist its Baluch minority.

Meanwhile, Iran’s top Sunni cleric Mowlavi Abdolhamid delivered another fiery sermon Friday, condemning the regime for taking advantage of people’s religious beliefs for its own political gains, implicitly referring to the regime-sponsored pilgrimage to Iraq for the Shiite ceremony of Arbaeen. 

Without mentioning the Arbaeen, the outspoken Sunni cleric of Zahedan decried the regime for allocation of huge resources for the pilgrimage. “In a country where people are suffering so much... spending billions on one religious ceremony from the nation's treasury and people’s pocket is not right."

"In a country where people can't find medicine and are hungry, is it fair to spend so much on a religious ceremony?" he asked. 

Arbaeen (literally meaning fortieth) is a Shiite religious observance that occurs forty days after the Day of Ashura, when according to religious legend Husayn (Hussain) ibn Ali, the grandson of Prophet Muhammad was killed on the 10th day of the month of Muharram in 680 AD. The Islamic Republic regime views the event as a show of influence in the region, encouraging high participation via numerous perks, including providing free medical services and rest stops along the way, free internet on the road and inside Iraq, offering interest-free loans and granting 200,000 Iraqi dinars ($153) to pilgrim as well as special passports with less bureaucratic requirements. The ration of cheap foreign currency – which used to be dollars or euros until this year – will be paid from Iran's frozen funds in Iraq, about to be released as part of a prisoner swap deal with the United States.

The Follow-up Committee of Iranian Detainees, an independent organization monitoring the status of protesters arrested during anti-regime rallies across the country, reported that the prisoners linked to the death of Basij member Rouhollah Ajamian were subjected to brutal methods. These methods included hanging them for extended periods while their hands and feet were cuffed behind their backs.

While earlier reports hinted at torture and forced confessions, this recent disclosure reveals the extent of the abuse. A source close to the accused in the case revealed that the torture had persisted for over a month. It involved methods such as mock executions, electric shocks, punches, kicks, and prolonged beatings.

Iran executed Mohammad-Mehdi Karami and Mohammad Hosseini in January, and this week the country's Supreme Court upheld harsh sentences for several other protesters allegedly involved in the killing of the Basij agent during antigovernment demonstrations near the capital Tehran in October.

Fourteen protestors faced trial in the case, with some receiving sentences of up to 15 years, which has been criticized by human rights advocates. "On the day the sentences were issued, everyone was sentenced to 25 years in prison, and five were sentenced to death," the committee cited an informed source as saying.

According to the rights group, Karami and Hosseini were told they had been pardoned just one day before their execution.

The Chief of the Law Enforcement Force of the Islamic Republic of Iran, Ahmedreza Radan, described the firm handling of troublemakers and thugs as a serious police directive, stating: I assure everyone that we will not be lenient against lawbreakers."

As the anniversary of the Women, Life Freedom movement approaches, Iranian officials and hardliner clerics have repeatedly warned potential demonstrators that the government will harshly deal with them. It took the regime months to quell nationwide street protests that started last September, when Mahsa Amini was killed in hijab police custody. Now, officials and hardcore regime supporters are concerned that a new round of protests will start next month.

Radan who was appointed at police chief in January amid the most serious antiregime protests in the past four decades, has been sanctioned by the United States for being “responsible for or complicit in, or responsible for ordering, controlling, or otherwise directing, the commission of serious human rights abuses against citizens of Iran or their family members."

He replaced Gen. Hossein Ashtari, whom according to Iran International’s sources, Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei scolded for his “incompetence” in quelling the protests.

Radan served as a deputy police chief from 2008 to 2014 and played a key role in the crackdown on protesters after the disputed 2009 presidential elections and in the formation of “morality police”.

In an article on Thursday, Etemad, one of Iran’s prominent reformist dailies, published a list of 157 tenured professors who were dismissed, forced into retirement, or banned from teaching for their criticism and dissenting views from 2006 to the end of August 2023. But the purge went beyond that, when non-tenured lecturers were replaced by "religious" and "revolutionary" professors.

The trend started after Mahmoud Ahmadinejad took office and continued in Hassan Rouhani’s administration and then under President Ebrahim Raisi, seeing successive governments in the Islamic Republic systematically expelling seasoned professors for their a "secular views," among other political reasons.

During a meeting with professors who were members of IRGC’s Basij forces in the first week of the purge, Ahmadinejad said that the main part of the professors’ duties is promoting “the culture and ideals of the Islamic revolution.” “The educational system and the approach to knowledge production need to change and Basij can play a role in promoting this in society," he said.

A year later and after firing dozens of professors, Ahmadinejad said "Our education system has been influenced by the secular system for 150 years... Changing this environment is challenging and complex, but the work has begun.” He also urged students to protest against the presence of “liberal and secular professors in universities.

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During all these years, the regime also tried its best to employ professors in line with the ideals of the Islamic Republic, Etemad elaborated, providing numerous cases of such recruitments.

One such regime ideologue was Sadreddin Shariati, the controversial head of Allameh Tabatabai University who embarked on strict sex segregation at the university in early 2010s. After expelling dozens of professors and employing more than 100 new ones for the university, he said, “I mounted a coup d'état against Westernization, superstitions, and ignorance at Allameh Tabatabai University. I recruited religious professors so that they do not talk about secularism in their lectures.” The incumbent education minister, Reza-Morad Sahraei, was Shariati’s right-hand man at the time.

Another case was Farhad Rahbar, who was the head of Iran’s Azad University in 2017 and now serves as an aide to Raisi. He cancelled contracts of all part-time professors and one-year contracts of 168 full-time professors at the Faculty of Science and Research of this university, leading to chaos at the start of the academic year. He then put the names of 2,800 professors employed in various units of the Azad University on a dismissal list. He planned to replace them with new recruits but was himself dismissed before he could implement his plan.

According to a report from the Ministry of Science, Research, and Technology in 2013, during Ahmadinejad's presidency, approximately 17,000 new faculty members were added to universities payroll. Such a move is speculated to be repeated as President Raisi plans to add 15,000 "revolutionary" professors to the academic faculty of universities nationwide in the near future.

Raisi embarked on his ‘purification’ in the first month of his tenure, expelling Bijan Abdolkarimi, an associate professor in the Department of Philosophy at the Islamic Azad University. In January 2022, Mohammad Fazeli, a professor of sociology at Beheshti University, and Arash Abazari, a philosophy professor at Sharif University, were dismissed. This was just the beginning and even months before the popular uprising across Iran ignited by the death of Mahsa Amini in police custody in September.

Since then, a large number of academics voiced solidarity with protesters and once the protests were quelled, the Raisi administration intensified the crackdown, pushing professors into early retirement, not renewing teaching contracts, cancelling classes without prior notice, removing and suspending professors, and reducing monthly salaries. Apart from these prevalent methods, tens of professors have also been summoned or temporarily detained.

This policy, appears to be part of a wider initiative to cleanse universities of critics of the regime and efforts to suppress student protests, has also led to announced delays in the start of the academic term in some universities while several universities may hold lectures online to reduce chances of campus protests on the first anniversary of Women, Life, Freedom movement.

Tahmasbi was among the youths who actively participated in the protests that unfolded from the 15th to the 17th of November in Izeh. He shared camaraderie with Mustafa Ahmadpour, another protester who was killed on the 21st of July in a fierce armed altercation with regime agents.

While unconfirmed reports suggest that Mehdi Almasi, who was driving the vehicle, was also fatally shot by IRGC forces, the identities of the victims and the incident itself cannot be independently verified by Iran International.

The IRGC issued a statement revealing that in response to “organized actions by armed and criminal elements in Izeh, orders were issued to detain them after identifying their locations and activities. These individuals resisted arrest and, in the exchange of gunfire, two were killed, while three were apprehended.”

Additional reports indicate that regime agents wounded two teenagers, Babak Bahmani and Shaayan Almasi, with gunshots and took them into custody.

In a previous development in April, eight citizens detained during the nationwide protests in Izeh were indicted for charges such as "waging war against God" and "corruption on earth," carrying potential death sentences. These arrests occurred in November 2022 by the intelligence agents of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.

Earlier this year, Iran's judiciary sentenced another protester, Abbas (Mojahed) Kourkouri, to death for the killing of a nine-year-old named Kian Pirfalak during the November unrest in Izeh. Kian and his family were targeted by unidentified individuals during a night of protests while they were in their car. The assault left Kian's father paralyzed due to severe injuries sustained during the attack."