clear

Creating new perspectives since 2009

Family members taken ‘hostage’ by Iran to silence critics abroad 

October 3, 2019 at 2:54 pm

Masih Alinejad, Iranian journalist and women’s rights activist, speaks on stage at the Women In The World Summit in New York, US, on 12 April 2019. [REUTERS/Brendan McDermid]

Iran’s Revolutionary Guard has arrested the family of US based Iranian journalist and human rights defender Masih Alinejad. The Voice of America journalist, who has been living in self-imposed exile since 2009 and is reported to have been threatened recently, is accused of “collaborating with hostile governments”, an offence that is punishable by one to ten years in prison.

Alinejad has become a thorn for the Iranian regime. She has waged several campaigns against repressive laws in the Islamic Republic. Her latest campaign, “Our weapon is our camera”, urges women to use their smartphones to record the verbal and physical violence to which they are subjected on the streets. The resulting videos, which are circulating widely on social networks, are said to have angered the regime and elicited hostile reactions from pro-regime militiamen.

The Iranians appear to have reacted to her ongoing campaign by going after members of her family. According to Reporters Without Borders (RSF) Alinejad’s brother, Alireza Alinejad, and her ex-husband’s sister, Leila Lotfi, were arrested by plainclothes Revolutionary Guard intelligence agents on 26 September in the northern city of Babol and in Tehran.

READ: Female Iran boxer cancels return home after arrest warrant issued

In a video posted by Alinejad in which she shared a recording her brother made before his arrest she said that “they have taken them hostage in order to silence me.” Her brother claimed that the Iranian regime was putting pressure on him and his family to publicly condemn Alinejad’s activities.

RSF suggested that the targeting of families of journalists and activists by Tehran had become a common practice used by the regime to go after its critics. Several prisoners of conscience, including journalists, are said to be currently being persecuted by the Iranian authorities. The advocacy group for press freedom cited the case of Farangis Mazloom, the mother of Soheil Arabi, the winner of the 2017 RSF Press Freedom Prize in the citizen-journalist category, who was arrested on 22 July after drawing attention to the conditions in which he is being held.

READ: Middle East is world’s biggest prison for journalists 

Sharzad Jafari, the sister of detained photojournalist Noushin Jafari, was also mentioned. She was arrested for similar reasons two weeks after her sister’s arrest on 3 August. She was released after being detained for three days.

RSF claimed that Iran’s attempt to restrict media freedom extend beyond the country’s borders. International media outlets are also said to be subjected to harassment. In the past year at least 25 cases of pressure being put on Iranian journalists based abroad and their families in Iran have been registered.

Iran’s record on press freedom is one of the worst in the word. This year it was ranked 170th out of 180 in the World Press Freedom Index. An RSF report earlier this year found that the Iranian government had arrested, imprisoned or executed at least 860 journalists in the three decades between the Islamic revolution in 1979 and 2009.

At the same time as the RSF report was published, Amnesty International issued a report accusing the Iranian authorities of a crackdown on dissent during 2018 with more than 7,000 people arrested, among them students, journalists, environmental campaigners and lawyers.