December 21, 2018
The Islamic Republic has arrested yet another dual national, this one a female fertility expert who teaches in Australia. It may have also arrested a second Iranian-Australian, also a demographer.
Both have published articles questioning the Supreme Leader’s policy of ending family planning programs and promoting a doubling of Iran’s population.
The state news agency said December 2 that an Iranian-Australian woman had been arrested and charged with working with foreign “espionage networks” to downplay the country¥s population issues and undercut the efforts of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenehi to promote larger families.
It did not give details of the charges, but quoted a lawyer who identified the woman as Meimanat Hosseini-Chavoshi.
She is listed by the University of Melbourne as working at its School of Population and Global Health. She has written many academic works on Iran¥s globally-lauded fertility and family-planning policies, which Khamenehi ordered ended.
The hardline daily Kayhan reported the same day on the arrest of several population “activists … who, under the cover of scientific activities, had infiltrated state bodies.”
It said they manipulated statistics and handed sensitive information to Iran¥s “enemies” as part of efforts at “cultural and social invasion.” By manipulating statistics, it presumably meant they were trying to cover up how low Iran’s fertility rate had fallen.
The Center for Human Rights in Iran (CHRI) said it had learned that another demographer, Mohammad-Jalal Abbasi-Shavazi, had been arrested and was also an academic in Australia. But Australian news outlets have not reported anything about Abbasi-Shavazi, while they have reported extensively on Chavoshi’s arrest.
The two of them co-authored a 2009 book entitled, “The Fertility Transition in Iran.”
Iran was once considered an international success story in population control, bringing birth rates down from seven per woman in the 1980s to 1.66 in 2016, according to World Bank figures.
Then-health minister Alireza Marandi received the United Nations Population Award in 2000 for his family planning initiatives, which had to overcome entrenched taboos in an Islamic society.
Chavoshi has written extensively about these efforts, which she described as the “fastest fall in fertility ever recorded” in the 2009 book.
In 2012, Khamenehi said it was a mistake to have continued the family planning policies of the 1990s into the 21st Century, and called for new measures to double the population to 150 million.
The Kayhan report said Iran¥s enemies were using population experts to counter these efforts by downplaying the gravity of the fertility rate decline.
“There is evidence these individuals are connected to Western espionage networks,” Nasrollah Pejmanfar, a member of the Majlis Cultural Committee, told the newspaper.
Chavoshi is the first Iranian-Australian ever known to be jailed by Iran.
There are at least 22 Iranian dual nationals currently imprisoned in Iran. They include six people with American passports and four people with British nationality.