Ebadi founded the center with the financial award she won with her Nobel peace prize in 2003.
Ebadi left Iran for a speaking tour the day before the presidential elections in 2009. When the crackdown began on the post-election protests, her friends advised Ebadi not to return. She has not gone back since. And the government has gone after the lawyers who worked with her.
Last Wednesday, Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, the International Campaign for Human Rights in Iran, Reporters Without Borders (RSF), the International Federation for Human Rights (FIDH), and the Iranian League for the Defense of Human Rights (LDDHI)—joined by Ebadi—renewed their call on authorities to quash the lawyer’s convictions and release them unconditionally.
“Journalists, human rights lawyers and rights defenders held solely on account of their peaceful activities – none of these people should be in prison in the first place,” said Ebadi. “Bullying a prisoner’s child or denying the person family visits and medical care only makes Iran look even worse in the eyes of the world.”
Since the arrest in 2010 of Sotoudeh, a 47-year-old human rights lawyer and mother of two children, the Iranian authorities have frequently held her in solitary confinement and prevented her from regularly meeting or speaking with her family. In the past few months, prison authorities have routinely denied other political prisoners regular visits with their relatives and access to adequate medical treatment, the groups charged.
Sotoudeh is being treated in the infirmary of Evin prison after she initiated a hunger strike October 17, her husband, Reza Khandan, told the rights groups. He said the hunger strike was in response to harassment of her family by the authorities and restrictions on her visitation rights.
Khandan said Sotoudeh initiated her hunger strike after hearing that Judiciary officials had summoned her 12-year-old daughter to inform her that she would not be allowed to travel abroad. Khandan said Sotoudeh felt “she had no choice” but to go on hunger strike to express her objection to the authorities’ harassment of her family and denial of her visitation rights.
For the past three months, the groups said, Evin prison authorities have prevented Sotoudeh’s children from visiting their mother face-to-face and severely restricted Sotoudeh’s ability to make telephone calls from prison. They have prohibited her from seeing her mother and brother for almost a year.
In January 2011 a Revolutionary Court sentenced Sotoudeh to 11 years in prison. An appeals court reduced her sentence to six years and a 10-year ban on travel and practicing law.
But Sotoudeh is just one of several lawyers affiliated with Ebadi to be pursued by the Islamic Republic.
On March 4, Abdol-Fattah Soltani learned that a Revolutionary Court had sentenced him to 18 years in prison, barred him from practicing law for 20 years, and ordered him to serve his sentence in Barazjan, about 1,200 kilometers (750 miles) south of Tehran, far from his family.
Prosecutors charged Soltani with “propaganda against the system,” “assembly and collusion against the state,” and “establishing an illegal group” – namely, the Center for Human Rights Defenders, which Soltani co-founded with Ebadi. An appeals court later reduced Soltani’s sentence to 13 years but upheld the 20-year ban on practicing law.
In April, an appeals court upheld a nine-year sentence for another Center lawyer, Mohammad Ali Dadkhah, on charges related to interviews with foreign media and membership in the Center. The court also sentenced Dadkhah to fines and flogging and banned him practicing law and teaching for 10 years.
Mohammad Seifzadeh, another rights lawyer and member of Ebadi’s Center, is serving a two-year sentence on similar charges, with other cases pending against him.