Friday, June 12, 2020

Amherst Chapter & IRAN

Many of human rights or ordinary citizens who stop by our Information Table at the Farmers Market may have this question in their mind: why the Amherst Chapter of Amnesty highlight the human rights of Iran with more focus than other Chapters? 

Why our current and previous adopted Prisoner of Conscience (POC) is from Iran? The main annual activity of the group was dedicated to Iran and the keynote speaker was from Iran in 2012.

We do not have any of our current members from Iran however, we have few active members who embrace Islam as religion/culture. These members in particular were/are concerned about the abuse of Islam in the hands of many dictators and Islamist military groups (Sunni or Shi'ite groups). 

Iran Human Rights

Amnesty International has been documenting and campaigning around serious human rights violations in Iran including detention of human rights defenders and other prisoners of conscience, unfair trials, torture and mistreatment in detention, deaths in custody and the application of the death penalty. Iran executes more people than any country in the world, other than China. Ethnic, religious and linguistic minority communities face persistent persecution. The Iranian authorities also suppress freedom of expression of a range of civil society actors including attorneys, scientists, environmental activists, artists, women’s rights activists, trade unionists, journalists and bloggers and those expressing their opinions on social media. There has been a worrying trend of imposing extreme sentences against prisoners of conscience such as human rights attorneys Nasrin Sotoudeh who has been sentenced to a total of 38 years in prison plus 148 lashes and Amirsalar Davoudi, who has been sentenced to 30 years in prison and 111 lashes for his human rights work, including publicizing violations through a channel he set up on the Telegram mobile messaging app and giving media interviews.