Ms. Nasrin
Sotoudeh, a prominent human rights lawyer and 2012 laureate of the European
Parliament’s Sakharov Prize, was arrested on June 13, 2018 at her home in
Tehran. She was subsequently taken to Tehran’s Evin prison to serve a five-year
prison sentence that was handed down against her in absentia in 2016 but had not been communicated to Ms.
Sotoudeh until her arrest, in blatant contravention of
national and international fair trial standards.
“We reiterate
our strong condemnation of the ongoing detention of Nasrin Sotoudeh, which is
clearly aimed at stopping her from conducting her human rights work. We ask the
UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention to declare the deprivation of liberty
of Nasrin Sotoudeh ‘arbitrary’ and to urge the Iranian authorities to
immediately and unconditionally release her”,
said Dimitris Christopoulos, FIDH President.
“Like many other fellow human rights
lawyers who were recently arrested or summoned to court, Ms. Sotoudeh’s
detention is a direct retaliation for defending political prisoners and
taking up human rights cases. We
urge the international community to condemn vehemently the increasing assault
against human rights lawyers in Iran and to at last hold Iranian authorities
accountable for the worsening human rights situation in the country”,
added Gerald Staberock, OMCT Secretary General.
On
August 25, 2018, Ms. Sotoudeh started a hunger strike to protest against her
detention on trumped-up charges and the judicial harassment faced by her family
and friends, including her husband, Mr. Reza
Khandan, who is also detained after having been arrested on September 4,
2018. On September 16, 2018, Ms. Sotoudeh was informed that she would be denied
her family visitation rights if she and her female visitors - including her
daughter - did not wear a full hijab. Ms Sotoudeh has refused the condition and
was denied the right to see her daughter on September 17, 2018.
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