What is Nowruz? Nowruz [pronounced NO-ROOZ- in Persian means "New-day"] is the Iranian New Year and marks the first day of Spring. Nowruz begins on the 1st day of Farvardin of the Iranian solar calendar which is usually March 20th or 21st. It is the biggest holiday celebrated by Iranians; a time of joy, celebration with family and friends, shared by people of all faiths that trace their history back through the centuries to the ancient Mesopotamian civilization and the Persian Empire. It has been celebrated for at least 3,000 years and is rooted in the rituals and traditions of the Zoroastrian religion. What Can I Do?

Take Action! Take action on behalf of seven prisoners in Iran for whom Amnesty has been campaigning. Many have been sentenced to long prison terms for their peaceful activism and some are in poor health. Send Nowruz greetings, solidarity messages and write letters on their behalf. Letter Writing Tips Previous Nowruz actions have been very successful! Hundreds of letters and solidarity messages have been sent from Amnesty members across Canada. Saeed Malekpour, featured in our Nowruz action for the past 10 years, was finally reunited with his sister, Maryam in Canada. Mohammad Ali Taheri, part of Nowruz action between 2016 to 2019 was released in April 2019.

Letters have a real impact on real lives . Whether it is an advocacy or solidarity action, your efforts matter! Please see next pages for this year Nowruz cases. Thank you for joining us! Share the news and photos from your event with us! You can email us at IranCoordinator@amnesty.ca

Arash Sadeghi

Human rights activist Arash Sadeghi has been imprisoned in Tehran’s Evin Prison since June 2016, serving two separate prison terms totaling 19 years. Arash Sadeghi is being punished for his peaceful human rights activities. He was sentenced to 15 years’ imprisonment in August 2015 after being convicted of spurious charges including “spreading propaganda against the system”, “gathering and colluding to commit crimes against national security”, “insulting the founder of the Islamic Republic” and “spreading lies”. The court also

activated a four-year suspended prison sentence from 2011, which was similarly related to his peaceful activism. The court verdict cited over 50 peaceful human rights activities as “evidence” of his involvement in “actions against [national] security” including communicating with Amnesty International and other human rights groups outside Iran. Arash Sadeghi was diagnosed with a cancerous bone tumour in June 2018. He underwent surgery on September 12, 2018, only to be transferred back to Raja’i Shahr prison on September 15, against strict explicit medical advice that required him to spend at least 25 days hospitalized following the operation so that he could be monitored by specialist doctors. Doctors said that they needed this post-operative recovery period to assess whether Arash Sadeghi required chemotherapy, radiation therapy or additional surgery. The authorities have been deliberately refused to provide Arash Sadeghi with urgently needed medical care. This cruel behaviour constitutes torture as defined in international law, since such deprivation is intentionally inflicting severe pain or suffering, apparently for the purpose of punishing him for his high-profile activism as a human rights defender and in reprisal for his peaceful hunger strike between October 2016 and January 2017, which attracted a major public outcry on his case. The denial of his access to life-saving medical care also violates his right to life. Arash Sadeghi's wife, Golrokh Ebrahimi Iraee , also a human rights activist and a writer, is behind bars. Send Nowruz greetings to Arash Sadeghi and/or his family via:

● Email: IranCoordinator@amnesty.ca - Please put NowruzAction in the subject ● Share your solidarity message with Arash and Golrokh and tag us so that we

can repost your message - hashtag #NowruzAction: ○ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/AitoIranActionCircle/ ○ Twitter: https://twitter.com/aiiactoronto ○ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/amnesty_toronto_iranac/

Maryam Akbari Monfared

Prisoner of conscience Maryam Akbari Monfared has been held in Tehran’s Evin prison since December 2009 serving a 15-year sentence. She was convicted of enmity against God” (moharebeh) based on an arbitrary interference with her privacy, family and correspondence. Her conviction is solely based on the fact that she had made phone calls to her relatives, who are members of a banned group, the People’s Mojahedin Organization of Iran (PMOI), and had visited them once in Iraq.

Maryam Akbari Monfared submitted a complaint to the prosecutor’s office in Tehran from inside prison in October 2016. The complaint concerns the extrajudicial execution and

enforced disappearance in 1988 of her sister Roghayeh and her brother Abdolreza, who was 17 years old at the time of his arrest in 1980. In her complaint, Maryam Akbari Monfared requested “an official investigation into the extrajudicial execution of her siblings” and sought “detailed information about the executions including the location of the mass graves, and the identity of the perpetrators. To date, the authorities have not processed her complaint. Instead, they have subjected her to reprisals. They have refused to take her to medical appointments outside prison to receive adequate treatment for her rheumatoid arthritis and thyroid problems. They have also repeatedly threatened to stop her family visits. On May 13, 2017, Maryam Akbari Monfared’s husband Hassan Jafari Hatam was summoned to the ministry of intelligence office in Tehran and told that his wife would face an additional three-year prison term and exile to a remote prison in Sistan-Baluchestan province, if she did not stop writing open letters about her complaint and pursuing the whereabouts of her siblings. Between July and September 1988, the Iranian authorities forcibly disappeared and extrajudicially executed thousands of imprisoned political dissidents in secret and dumped their bodies, mostly in unmarked mass graves. Since then, the authorities have treated the killings as state secrets, tormenting the relatives by refusing to tell them how and why their loved ones were killed and where they are buried. No official has been brought to justice and, in some cases, those involved hold or have held positions of power in Iran. Families and human rights defenders seeking truth, justice and reparation for thousands of prisoners who were summarily executed or forcibly disappeared in the 1980s have faced new levels of retribution by the authorities. Send Nowruz greetings to Maryam Akbari Monfared and/or her family via:

● Email: IranCoordinator@amnesty.ca - Please put NowruzAction in the subject ● Share your solidarity message with Maryam and tag us so that we can repost

your message - hashtag #NowruzAction: ○ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/AitoIranActionCircle/ ○ Twitter: https://twitter.com/aiiactoronto ○ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/amnesty_toronto_iranac/

Niloufar Bayani

Prisoner of conscience and McGill graduate, Niloufar Bayani is one of the eight scientists behind bars in Evin Prison since January 2018. Without providing any evidence, the Iranian authorities accused the conservationists, affiliated to the non-profit organization, the Persian Wildlife Heritage Foundation, of using scientific and environmental projects, such as tracking the Asiatic cheetah with cameras, as a cover to collect classified military information, even though the use of cameras is a standard tool used by conservationists to monitor rare and endangered species. Following their arrests, the scientists were held incommunicado without access to a lawyer and

limited family contact. The unfair trial relied almost entirely on “confessions” allegedly made under torture and later retracted, as the main evidence against them. Niloufar Bayani told the court that she only made a “confession” after she was “broken” through physical and psychological torture and that she later retracted her “confession”. She said interrogators threatened to beat her, inject her with hallucinogenic drugs, pull out her fingernails and arrest her parents; they also showed her a piece of paper saying that it was her death sentence. During one of the trial sessions, the judge told Niloufar Bayani to leave the courtroom for being “too disruptive” after she repeatedly objected to her retracted forced “confession” being used against her and the other conservationists. Consequently, she was not allowed to appear in court for the final three trial sessions. In November 2019 the jailed conservationists (Niloufar Bayani, Houman Jowkar, Morad Tahbaz, Taher Ghadirian, Amirhossein Khaleghi, Sepideh Kashani, Abdolreza Kouhpayeh and Sam Rajabi) were sentenced to prison terms ranging from 4 to 10 years after grossly unfair trials. The lengthy prison sentences were upheld by the appeal court. Niloufar Bayani has been sentenced to 10 years’ imprisonment. She has managed to send out some letters from the prison describing the torture, including the threats of sexual assult, that she was subjected to by her interrogators. The eight conservationists were among nine scientists who were arrested by the Revolutionary Guards in January 2018. One of them, Kavous Seyed-Emami, a Canadian-Iranian scientist and academic, died under suspicious circumstances in Evin prison two weeks after his arrest. There has never been an independent investigation of his death. His wife, Maryam Mombeini was finally reunited with her two sons in Canada in October 2019 after authorities prevented her from leaving Iran in March 2018. Send Nowruz greetings to Niloufar Bayani and/or her family via:

● Email: IranCoordinator@amnesty.ca - Please put NowruzAction in the subject ● Share your solidarity message with Niloufar and tag us so that we can repost

your message - hashtag #NowruzAction: ○ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/AitoIranActionCircle/ ○ Twitter: https://twitter.com/aiiactoronto ○ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/amnesty_toronto_iranac/

Amirsalar Davoudi

Human rights lawyer and prisoner of conscience Amirsalar Davoudi has been sentenced to 29 years and three months in prison and 111 lashes on charges stemming from his human rights work. Under Iran’s sentencing guidelines, he is required to serve 15 years of this sentence. Amirsalar Davoudi was arrested in

November 2018 by agents from the intelligence unit of the judiciary at his workplace in Tehran and transferred to section 241 of Tehran’s Evin prison, which is run by the same unit. There he was held in solitary confinement, during which he was frequently interrogated without a lawyer present. He was then moved to a cell with other prisoners in the same section, before being transferred to section 7 of the prison in June 2019. In May 2019 Amirsalar Davoudi learned that branch 15 of the Revolutionary Court in Tehran had convicted him, in his absence, on six charges and sentenced him to a total of 29 years and three months in prison and 111 lashes. The charges included “insulting the Supreme Leader”, “spreading propaganda against the system” and “forming a group with the purpose of disrupting national security” in relation to his human rights work. The charges related to media interviews he had given and posts he had uploaded to a channel he runs on the mobile messaging app Telegram in which he raised concerns about the authorities’ treatment of lawyers and, more generally, the human rights situation in Iran. Amirsalar Davoudi is a prominent human rights lawyer who has represented many prisoners of conscience including human rights defenders, other civil society activists and members of ethnic and religious minorities. He was the lawyer of Iranian Kurdish woman Zeynab Jalalian, who was sentenced to death in early 2009 for the charge of “enmity against God” (moharebeh) after a grossly unfair trial. He played an instrumental role in the subsequent commutation of her death sentence. He has also persistently advocated for Zeynab Jalalian’s access to medical care. Iranian authorities have been cracking down on human rights lawyers, prosecuting some in relation to their peaceful human rights work, including their defence of clients facing spurious national security charges. In March 2019, Nasrin Sotoudeh was sentenced to 33 years and six months in prison and 148 lashes. She is required to serve 12 years of this sentence in addition to five years from a separate case. Send Nowruz greetings to Amirsalar Davoudi and/or her family via:

● Email: IranCoordinator@amnesty.ca - Please put NowruzAction in the subject ● Share your solidarity message with Amirsalar and tag us so that we can repost

your message - hashtag #NowruzAction: ○ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/AitoIranActionCircle/ ○ Twitter: https://twitter.com/aiiactoronto ○ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/amnesty_toronto_iranac/

Mahmoud Beheshti Langroudi

Mahmoud Beheshti Langroudi, the spokesperson and former president for the Iran Teachers' Trade Association, has been behind bars since September 2017 serving multiple sentences. He has been sentenced to a total of 14 years in prison following three separate convictions related to his peaceful trade union activities. Iran Teachers’ Trade Associations (ITTA) is a nationwide union with local branches in

almost all of Iran’s 31 provinces. Of these, at least 17 are officially registered. ITTA is an official member of Education International, an international body that represents educational workers. This is not the first time that Mahmoud Beheshti has been arrested or imprisoned for his peaceful trade union activities. He was first arrested in 2004, and later in March 2007 during a rally with thousands of teachers in front of Iran’s Parliament, protesting new state employment regulations. In April 2010 he was arrested again for protesting the mistreatment of his imprisoned colleagues, including Rasoul Bodaghi. Mahmoud Beheshti has been handed three separate sentences of four-year, 5-year and another 4-year of imprisonment during the past twelve years, all on charges of “gathering and colluding against the national security” and “spreading propaganda against the state”. The latest sentence was upheld by the appeal court in September 2017. Mahmoud Beheshti continues his peaceful human rights activities while behind bars by defending the rights of political prisoners through writing open letters. The Iranian authorities have subjected numerous teacher trade unionists to years of harassment, arbitrary arrest and detention, and lengthy prison sentences following unfair trials. In addition to Mahmoud Beheshti, other imprisoned teachers in Iran include Esmail Abdi and Mohammad Habibi, serving prison sentences for peacefully exercising their rights as trade unionists. On May 10, 2018, the Iranian authorities violently dispersed a peaceful protest by teachers in Tehran, who were calling for higher wages and better funding of the country’s public education system. By the end of the year, the authorities had arrested at least 23 teachers following nationwide strikes in October and November. Eight were sentenced to between nine months and 10 and a half years in prison, 74 lashes each, and other penalties. Send Nowruz greetings to Mahmoud Beheshti and/or his family via:

● Email: IranCoordinator@amnesty.ca - Please put NowruzAction in the subject ● Share your solidarity message with Mahmoud and tag us so that we can repost your

message - hashtag #NowruzAction: ○ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/AitoIranActionCircle/ ○ Twitter: https://twitter.com/aiiactoronto ○ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/amnesty_toronto_iranac/

Mojgan Keshavarz

Women’s rights defender and prisoner of conscience Mojgan Keshavarz is behind bars solely because of her peaceful campaigning against discriminatory forced veiling laws in Iran. Mojgan Keshavarz was arrested in April 2019, along with two other women’s rights defender, Yasaman Aryani and her mother, Monireh Arabshahi, in relation to a video that went viral on social media, showing them without their headscarves, distributing flowers to female passengers on a metro train on International Women’s Day on 8 March 2019, and discussing their hopes for a future when all women in Iran would have the freedom to choose what to wear. Following their arrests, they were held in prolonged solitary confinement, which

violates the absolute prohibition on torture and other cruel, inhumane and degrading treatment under international law, and pressured to appear before a camera, “confessing” that foreign elements were behind their activism against forced veiling and “repenting” their actions. In July 2019 Mojgan Keshavarz was unjustly sentenced to 23 years and six months in prison while the other two were unjustly sentenced to 16 years in prison. All three prison sentences consist of a one-year term for “spreading propaganda against the system”, a fiveyear term for “gathering and colluding to commit crimes against national security”, and a 10-year term for “inciting and facilitating corruption and prostitution” through promoting “unveiling”. Mojgan Keshavarz’s sentence includes an additional prison term of seven years and six months for “insulting Islamic sanctities”. None of the women had access to lawyers during the trial and all three reported being verbally abused and threatened by the judge. This was essentially a sham trial. In February 2020 we learnt that Yasaman and Monireh had their sentences reduced to 9 years and 7 months by an appeals court. Mojgan Keshavarz’ sentence has been reduced to 12 years and 7 months.

Making criminals of women and girls who refuse to wear the hijab is an extreme form of discrimination. Forced veiling laws violate a whole host of rights, including the rights to equality, privacy and freedom of expression and belief. These laws degrade women and girls, stripping them of their dignity and self-worth. Send Nowruz greetings to Mojgan Keshavarz and/or her family via:

● Email: IranCoordinator@amnesty.ca - Please put NowruzAction in the subject ● Share your solidarity message with Mojgan and tag us so that we can repost

your message - hashtag #NowruzAction: ○ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/AitoIranActionCircle/ ○ Twitter: https://twitter.com/aiiactoronto ○ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/amnesty_toronto_iranac/

Taher Hajighorbani

Taher Hajighorbani is a follower of Interuniversalism (Erfan-e Halgheh ), a spiritual group. He has been sentenced to 20 years’ imprisonment because of his campaigning for the release of Mohammad Ali Taheri, founder of Erfan-e Halgheh (Mohammad Ali Taheri was featured in our previous Nowruz Action ). Taher Hajighorbani was first arrested in 2009 during protests that followed the contested re-election of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. He was held in detention for 13 days in Evin Prison before being released on bail. After his release, Taher was kept under state surveillance and was interrogated at least once a year by Iranian intelligence agents. Three years after his release, Taher joined the Interuniversalism Community and completed their courses. During this time, Mohammad Ali Taheri was arrested and sentenced to death under the charge of

“spreading corruption on earth”. Taher Hajighorbani actively campaigned on behalf of Mohammad Ali Taheri. Mohammad Ali Taheri was eventually released in April 2019. Around this time, Taher was summoned by judicial notice. He was informed by security agents that he was being charged with violating national security because of his campaigning. If he did not confess, security agents threatened to lock him up in a cell with violent criminals in the notorious Greater Tehran Central Penitentiary. Under duress, Taher Hajighorbani signed a confession. His trial was held in September 2019 during which Taher ’s lawyer was not present. In a closed trial, Judge Moghiseh of the Revolutionary Court found Taher Hajighorbani guilty and sentenced him to 20 years’ imprisonment for ‘national security offences’, ‘insulting the Supreme Leader’ and ‘insulting sanctities’. He was detained and transferred to Evin Prison, where he is currently held. On appeal, the sentence was upheld. Taher Hajighorbani has developed recurrent respiratory illness while imprisoned in Evin Prison. Send Nowruz greetings to Taher Hajighorbani and/or his family via:

● Email: IranCoordinator@amnesty.ca - Please put NowruzAction in the subject ● Share your solidarity message with Taher and tag us so that we can repost your

message - hashtag #NowruzAction: ○ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/AitoIranActionCircle/ ○ Twitter: https://twitter.com/aiiactoronto ○ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/amnesty_toronto_iranac/