Roxana Saberi

Please take a moment to sign this online letter calling on Iran’s government to release all student prisoners of conscience; end its practice of discrimination in university admission and enrollment; and allow students to freely practice their right to expression, association, and assembly.

International Campaign for Human Rights in Iran:

Video:  Iran’s Future Held Captive

Between April 2009 and September 2011, Iranian authorities arrested at least 436 students, and sentenced 254 students, many of whom were mistreated in prison. At least 364 students have been barred from continuing their education, many for their political as well as religious beliefs. Currently, there are over 30 students detained in Iran.

Your message will be sent to the following Iranian government officials:  Ayatollah Sayyid Ali Khamenei, Supreme Leader; Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, President; Mohammad Javad Larijani, Head of Iran’s High Council for Human Rights; Ayatollah Sadegh Larijani, Head  of the Judiciary; Ali Akbar Salehi, Minister of Foreign Affairs; and Hamid Reza Haji Babaee, Minister of Education.

10 Most Censored Countries

Los Angeles Times
April 30, 2012

TEHRAN — As hundreds of thousands of bookworms converge on this capital, Iranian writers are pleading with the government to loosen its grip and allow a banned publisher into the Tehran International Book Fair.

The 10-day book fair, which kicks off Tuesday at the Grand Mosque Mosalla, bills itself as “the most important publishing event in Asia and the Middle East,” drawing an average of 550,000 visitors a day. Though most publishers come from the Islamic world, the festival also welcomes Western companies hawking scientific or technical titles such as “Bioeconomics of Fisheries Management” and “Succeeding with Technology” — and any other books that abide by “Islamic values.”

That may have tripped up a disputed Iranian company, Cheshmeh, which had its license suspended late last year, halting the presses that printed Western philosophy, Iranian short stories, history books from Cambridge and the Orhan Pamuk novel “My Name Is Red,” among other titles.

Iranian officials haven’t explained why the company was shut down, despite the outcry from writers and publishers. It had been one of several publishers accused of promoting a Western lifestyle.

An online petition that includes writers and translators expressed concern about Cheshmeh’s suspension and absence from the book fair, saying it made the selection of books available in Iran “thinner and weaker.”

The Tehran book fair has clamped down on publishers before: Two years ago the government refused to allow any books into the fair that had been approved for publication before 2005, when Mahmoud Ahmadinejad became president. Iranian officials have confiscated books and shut down stalls in the past.

But even if Cheshmeh and other publishing houses are ultimately shut out of the annual festival, their books won’t necessarily be shut out of Iran. Despite the firm dictates of religious and cultural ministers, a vibrant underground market for banned books and movies exists in Tehran.

“Give me any banned or illegal book. I can copy it exactly like the original one in less than a week and market it in the network across the country,” one Tehran man boasted. “Any book that’s banned will be a hit in the market.”

The street stalls are called nayab foreshi, Farsi for “rarely available items.” Yet the forbidden books are actually very much available, albeit at a price. Books and films banned by Iranian authorities are pirated within days and sold at inflated prices by street vendors who risk months in jail for shilling the forbidden tales.

Reporters Without Borders
April 25, 2012
(In Farsi)

PUBLISHED ON WEDNESDAY 25 APRIL 2012.

Reporters Without Borders strongly condemns the arrest of Narges Mohammadi, a journalist and spokesperson of Nobel peace laureate Shirin Ebadi’s Centre for Human Rights Defenders. She was detained in the northern city of Zanjan on 21 April after receiving an intelligence ministry summons and was transferred to Tehran’s Evin prison to serve a six-year jail sentence.

The press freedom organization also deplores a 21 April government decree making it obligatory for news agencies and other news media to always identify the source of any information they publish.

Originally arrested at her home on 10 June 2010, Mohammadi had a nervous breakdown and became seriously ill while held, and was provisionally released on 2 July 2010. She was sentenced two months later to 11 years in prison on charges of collaborating with the Human Rights Defenders Centre, “meeting and conspiring against the Islamic Republic” and anti-government propaganda. The sentence was reduced to six years on appeal on 4 March 2011.

Mohammadi’s husband, fellow journalist Taghi Rahmani, told Reporters Without Borders he is very worried about her deteriorating health. Rahmani, who has worked for many media since 1981, has also been constantly harassed by the security services and has spent a total of 14 years in Iranian prisons. He finally fled the country earlier this year.

Adopted at a cabinet meeting on 21 April, the decree defining “executive regulation of the press law” states that its goal is “organizing the activities of news agencies and electronic media and exercising more control over their work.” It says news agencies, like other media, must “identify the origin of the information they publish” and are “forbidden to quote information from websites that have been blocked or newspapers that have been suspended.”

When parliament amended the press law in August 2009, it added the following phrase to the first article: “News agencies have the same rights and responsibilities as the print media.”

The Islamic Republic’s first press law, adopted in 1985, aimed to implement the constitution’s vague statement of media freedom principles but it was also very imprecise. It was reinforced by an explicitly repressive package of measures that conservatives rushed through the fifth parliament in April 2000 with the aim of reining in the reformist press. Since then, the judicial authorities have repeatedly banned reformist newspapers.

ANGELS OF IRAN | A VOICE FOR THE VOICELESS: ROXANA SABERI

The story of Roxana Saberi’s time in prison with Mahvash Sabet and Fariba Kamalabadi, two of The Yaran (“the Friends”), sentenced to 20 years in prison simply for helping administer the needs of the Baha’i community in Iran. Featuring journalist Roxana Saberi and Elise Auerbach, Iran Specialist for Amnesty International USA.

Roxana:  ”I think the lessons that Mahvash and Fariba taught me in prison are universal. And they can apply to anybody, anywhere in the world. You don’t have to be in prison. We have our own prisons, are own adversities, and we can try to turn those adversities into opportunities.”
EXECUTIVE PRODUCER: David Hoffman
PRODUCER / DIRECTOR: Jeff Kaufman
EDITOR / FIELD AUDIO: Daniel Kaufman
ASSISTANT EDITOR: Emett Casey
CINEMATOGRAPHY: Colin Trenbeath
A Single Arrow Productions film

McClatchy Newspapers
By Lesley Clark
April 23, 2012

WASHINGTON — President Barack Obama took aim Monday at Syria and Iran, imposing new sanctions on the two regimes as well as the “digital guns for hire” that develop technology enabling the two governments to monitor, track and harass their own people.

The same satellite communications, mobile phone and Internet technology used by activists across the Middle East and North Africa to speak to the outside world is being used against them in Syria and Iran, amid a “deplorable and deteriorating human rights situation” in both countries, the White House said.

Obama used the backdrop of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum to announce the new measures – along with a stepped-up U.S. effort to detect and deter mass killings and genocide.

“Too often, the world has failed to prevent the killing of innocents on a massive scale,” said Obama, who was introduced at the event by Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel. “We are haunted by the atrocities that we did not stop and the lives we did not save.”

The executive order Obama signed establishes financial and U.S visa sanctions against those who perpetrate or assist in what the White House calls “Grave Human Rights Abuses Via Information Technology” in Syria and Iran – or GHRAVITY. It comes amid fighting in Syria despite a cease-fire and as Obama has come under criticism from some Republicans who say the U.S. needs to get tougher with Syrian leader Basher Assad.

Obama called the sanctions on the governments and private tech companies “one more step that we can take toward the day that we know will come – the end of the Assad regime that has brutalized the Syrian people.”

“These technologies should be in place to empower citizens, not to repress them,” he said.

Treasury officials said the order targets people involved in developing technology “that could assist in or enable human rights abuses.” Treasury imposed sanctions on the Syrian General Intelligence Directorate, its director Ali Maluku, Iran’s Ministry of Intelligence and Security, Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, Iran’s Law Enforcement Forces, the Iranian Internet service provider Data Telecom, and the Syrian communication firm Striate.

All but Data already had been targeted for sanctions by Treasury under other violations. Under the new sanctions, any property in the U.S. in which they have an interest will be blocked, and Americans are prohibited from engaging in transactions with them.

Although Iran and Syria are targeted in the order, an administration official noted that Obama has the authority to impose sanctions on other countries if he chooses. The administration targeted Iran and Syria, the administration official said, “because of the ongoing and increasing use of technology by those governments to target people for grave human rights abuses.”

Obama raised the specter of the Holocaust and past massacres in Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia and Darfur to promise a focus on preventing genocide that involves nearly a dozen federal agencies.

“This is not an afterthought,” he said. “This is not a sideline in our foreign policy.”

The Atrocities Prevention Board, which will be chaired by Samantha Power, the White House National Security Council senior director for multilateral and humanitarian affairs, was to meet for the first time Monday at the White House and report to Obama in six months.

It also will monitor the National Intelligence Council’s preparation of the first-ever national intelligence estimate on the global risk of mass atrocities and genocide and will work with the director of national intelligence to include information about mass atrocity threats in the annual threat assessment to Congress.

“Across government, alert channels will ensure that information about unfolding crises and dissenting opinions quickly reach decision makers, including me,” Obama said.

He said that the Treasury Department will work to more quickly deploy financial tools to block the flow of money to abusive regimes and that the State Department would improve its ability to “surge our diplomats and experts in a crisis.”

And he said the U.S. Agency for International Development will challenge high-tech companies to help create new technologies to quickly expose violations of human rights.

“We need to be doing everything we can to prevent and respond to these kinds of atrocities because national sovereignty is never a license to slaughter your people,” Obama said.

He also announced that the U.S. will continue to deploy U.S. military advisers to assist Uganda and other regional African forces that are pursuing the murderous Lord’s Resistance Army, led by rebel Joseph Konya.

He called it part of a “regional strategy to end the scourge that is the LRA and help realize a future where no African child is stolen from their family and no girl is raped and no boy is turned into a child soldier.”

He noted that later this spring he will posthumously award the Presidential Medal of Freedom to Jan Karaka, a young Polish Catholic “who witnessed Jews being put on cattle cars, who saw the killings, and who told the truth, all the way to President Roosevelt himself.”

Obama also used his speech to defend his policy toward Iran, which has come under criticism from his Republican rivals, who accuse him of failing to convince the country to abandon its quest for nuclear weapons. Analysts, however, have said that the administration has imposed some of the toughest sanctions against Iran in the regime’s history.

Campaigning in Pennsylvania ahead of Tuesday’s primary, Republican presidential front-runner Mitt Romney called Obama’s approach to Iran one of his great failings.

“When he came into office he should have put into place aggressive, crippling sanctions against Iran,” he said. “And then over the last year or two he’s been acting like he’s more concerned that Israel might take action to get rid of (Iran’s) nuclear weapons than he is about Iran developing nuclear weapons.”

Obama told the crowd at the museum, which included Holocaust survivors, that he’s promised he will “always be there for Israel.”

“When faced with a regime that threatens global security and denies the Holocaust and threatens to destroy Israel, the United States will do everything in our power to prevent Iran from getting a nuclear weapon,” he said.

Human rights groups applauded the focus on genocide prevention.

“This new ‘all of government approach’ reflects hard-learned lessons from tardy responses to past humanitarian crises,” said Frank Jannuzi, Amnesty International USA’s deputy executive director for advocacy, policy and research.

Read more here: http://www.kansascity.com/2012/04/23/3572289/obamas-new-sanctions-against-syria.html#storylink=cpy