to freedom of speech met for their annual fundraiser in Canada earlier this month, leaving a seat empty in honor of jailed Iranian-Canadian blogger Hossein Derakhshan.
The annual PEN Canada benefit, held last Wednesday, was the launch pad for Toronto’s International Festival of Authors (IFOA). During the PEN Canada benefit and all subsequent IFOA events, the stage featured an empty chair symbolizing the absence of Derakhshan, who was recently sentenced in Iran to nearly 20 years in jail.
Derakhshan, 35, also known as the “blogfather,” was honored at the event for his extensive work training pro-democracy activists in the finer points of blogging and podcasting. His Farsi language blogging manual encouraged Iranians all over the world to use the Internet to spread their voices and circumvent Iranian media controls. He was arrested in November 2008 on charges of spreading propaganda against the Islamic regime.
Ottawa has pressured Tehran to release Derakhshan, a dual Iranian-Canadian, but the two countries do not enjoy a close relationship. The relationship soured in 2003, when, Zahra Kazemi, an Iranian-Canadian freelance photographer living in Montreal, was arrested in Iran and died in custody. Tehran maintains that she fell and hit her head. But a physician who treated her just before her death said her body showed signs of torture, including the fact that some of her fingernails had been removed.
PEN International president John Ralston Saul said there was no better way to address the importance of free speech than in the context of a literary festival, which is why the empty chair symbol has become a common practice at similar events around the world.
“The purpose of freedom of expression is not for us to be deadly serious all the time. The purpose of freedom of expression sometimes is for us to have fun. The point of freedom of expression is that we are allowed to do whatever we want with it,” Saul said.