84 reporters have been detained, the latest for interviewing families of protesters on death row
Iran is experiencing its fourth month of protests as the regime tightens its grip on journalists trying to report on the mobilizations, and 84 reporters have been detained, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ). Mehdi Beik, head of the Politics section of the reformist newspaper ‘Etemad’, is the latest to join the list of journalists arrested, as confirmed by his own outlet. Beik’s last works consisted of interviews with relatives of detainees in the protests who have been sentenced to death, an uncomfortable subject for the authorities. The reporter’s wife wrote on Twitter that “agents from the Ministry of Information took him away and also took his phone and laptop,” the BBC reports. The charges have not been made public as of yet.
In addition to the persecution suffered by local reporters, we must add the pressure on those around them. “The families of many detained journalists have been intimidated into remaining silent, the threat is that if they publicly denounce the case, the detention of their loved ones will be prolonged,” denounces CPJ. Reporting is very complicated for local reporters and impossible for international ones due to the fact that press visas have not been granted since September.
Protests broke out in Iran in September after the death of the young Mahsa Amini at the hands of the Tehran Moral Police. She was arrested for not wearing her veil correctly and she did not leave the police station alive. Since then, the mobilizations have followed one another, there are at least 500 deaths, according to data from the Human Rights Activists News Agency (HRANA), and at least two young people have been hanged after quick trials that humanitarian organizations denounce for the lack of guarantees. The two executed were accused of ‘moharebeh’, which can be translated as ‘enmity against God’, which in Iran carries the death penalty.
sexual abuse
In the Reporters Without Borders (RSF) annual report, published in December, the Islamic republic ranked third as the country with the most jailed journalists, surpassed by China and Myanmar.
In these four months, complaints of sexual abuse against women detained in the protests have reached the international media. The regime has always denied it and has defended that it was “information from hostile media”, but this week the Mezan news portal, linked to the Ministry of Justice, reported that “the vice president of the judicial authority for international affairs and secretary of the High Council for Human Rights, Kazem Gharibabdi, has called on the country’s attorney general to carry out a thorough investigation into allegations of sexual assault and rape of some inmates.”
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