Torture in Iranian Prisons: Behind Bars, Nobody is Safe

Iranian blogger, Nazanin Namdar, Roozonline:

Torture in Iran’s judicial, security and law enforcement agencies is not a secret any longer. There is even no attempt to hide. Many detainees are subjected to its various forms in the first phase of their interrogations. The specific nature of the torture that a person receives depends on who he is and what the charges against him are. But there is no official in the police or in the judiciary of Iran who would not speak about its presence or try to hide it.

In his latest opinion, the deputy police chief said “one cannot deny torture in detention centers.” He is quick to add that “… it is an illegal act.” At a Supervisory Meeting of the NAJA (Law Enforcement of the Islamic Republic of Iran) Mohammad Nouri, Deputy Chief of Police said that torture and any other act of violence is illegal and those committing are punishable after a due investigation. He also said that people could file complaints against such acts in the military tribunals and NAJA’s Central Investigation Center. READ MORE

But those who have been through such interrogations often state in their court hearings, according to their files, that they had been under pressure to make false confessions during their questioning. In a file belonging to a case where Heydar S., a student was accused of paying individuals to obtain test questions for a national university entry exam, the defendant states that he had nothing to do with buying or selling test questions but he wrote and signed whatever the interrogators and prosecutors asked him to do simply to get out of the jail. Rasool G., another defendant in the same case states that everything that he wrote and signed during his interrogations and detention are untrue. Jamshid, another defendant asserts that I wrote and signed things under complete duress. In the same file, Mehrdad B. told the judge that he was not even literate enough to write, but signed whatever they asked him to. READ MORE

Akbar Ganji, the journalist political prisoners currently on hunger strike in Evin prison too makes reference to the file of the national test fraud in his letter from the prison. “The Prosecutor has claimed that my cell door is open and that I am in touch with other prisoners,” he has written, adding that it is a lie. “Prisoners are normally kept away from other prisoners during the interrogation periods and kept in solitary confinement so that they do not collude with other prisoners and so that the pressure to which they are subjected will make it easier for the prisoners to confess to anything their captors ask for,” he adds. “I have heard the prisoners of this case request to be taken out for fresh air or to have their small windows opened, but there is absolutely no communication between prisoners. Furthermore, I learned that one of the prisoners from this case had gone on a 14-day hunger strike,” Ganji adds in his letter.

The police, to whom this file had been passed on to about two years ago, arrested the defendants on different occasions. According to Seyed Mahmoud Tabatabai, the prosecutor of Branch 12 of Tehran’s 7th District Court stationed in Evin prison, there are 130 detainees in this case, but only 27 people were charged and found guilty. Three individuals were acquitted.

Branch 12 of Tehran’s 7th District Court is a well-known branch. It is where Zahra Kazemi, the Iranian-Canadian journalist was taken to after her arrest and where she received fatal blows to her head that killed her. Two months after Kazemi’s death, Tehran Prosecutor Saeed Mortezavi wrote to Majlis (Parliament) committee investigating the crime that the Director of Evin prison informed Branch 12 of Tehran’s 7th District Court that Kazemi had had a brain concussion. Mortezavi adds in his letter that the arrest warrant for Kazemi was based on the contents of the file and had been approved by a magistrate as well.

What is clear from this letter is that Kazemi’s arrest warrant was issued by this very Branch of Tehran’s District Court, which had been involved in her case. Many Majlis representatives, journalists and those following Zahra Kazemi’s case are of the belief that it is the Office of Tehran Prosecutor which has been directly involved in her murder.

So while torture is banned in Iran under its laws, it is practiced and prisoners must present their complaints against the very agencies that practices, nothing is done to stop it.

Physical torture is the most common type of violence committed against prisoners to get confessions. Beating of prisoners is so common that many require medical treatment from the prison clinics on a regular basis while under interrogation. Beating as torture is common in all the detention facilities of Iran. Captives on charges of fornication, immorality, use of drugs, manslaughter, etc, which are crimes for which confessions are not easy to obtain are usually the first victims of systematic torture. Many writers who had been sued by the law enforcement officials have said that in their detention centers they had witnessed many prisoners who had beaten to the point of death.

Student prisoners too - because they are not prominent or influential individuals - have been subjected to horrific physical torture during their detentions. Batebi is a classic example. He was an unknown person during his detention who later wrote in detail to his judge what he had been subjected to while in prison. His writings demonstrate the violent practices that are common and the methods prison officials use to get confessions or signatures from prisoners.

For political prisoners, psychological torture is more common. No matter who the prisoner is, there are ways to break him. Long solitary confinement periods in small white cells with very dim lighting are a common experience of all political and journalist prisoners in recent years. Some prisoners are interrogated continuously for days and nights, without any rest. In many cases prisoners are not even told of the reason for their detention or the charges against them.

In many unofficial prisons, there are no toilet facilities in the prison cell. The prisoner must ring a bell or call the guards to be taken to a toilet down a hall. The guards on the other hand are reluctant to respond to such calls and prisoners who need to go to toilet because of physical and psychological pressures are left unattended for hours. In a case that involved the imprisonment of members of the National Radio and TV Network, the detainees were denied toilet access to the point where they had to use their food plates in their prison cells to deal with nature.

Another practice that is used by prison officials is threatening to arrest the relatives of the prisoners. Political and journalist prisoners are routinely subjected to this. In some cases drugs are used in the food that is provided to prisoners to weaken the resistance of prisoners. Prisoners have talked of hearing their mothers, sisters or spouses calling for help in their sleep. The Iranian Jurists Committee on Human Rights has a file under investigation in which a prisoner is played a tape recorded voice of the prisoner’s relatives.

A year after Saeed Emami, the security officer who is considered the mastermind behind the government’s serial killers and who was found dead in his prison cell, was arrested, the official handling the case distributed a video film that showed the most unusual form of interrogation. In the film, the interrogators of the detained security officials, who themselves were at one time interrogators, resorted to sexual questioning of the detainees. In the film, Saeed Emami’s wife “confesses” to having had sexual affairs with the other collaborators of the case. In one scene, Emami’s wife is asked to confess about her affairs or about her husband’s sexual deviations. She protests and pleads, while the interrogator threatens her with “you know what will happen if you don’t” words. In the next scene she describes in detail sexual acts that she completely denies on her subsequent release.

This type of questioning has been repeated for many young political and journalist prisoners. In official documents available on Gooya website, there are cases where a prisoner describes his sexual relations. Many such prisoners are also threatened with rape if they do not cooperate. Batebi, the student who became famous during the student unrest of 1999 and whose photograph appeared on the front page of the British magazine the Economist, which won him a prison cell and a 15 year prison sentence, has spoken of this in his famous letter to his judge, which was also published and distributed widely. Even weblog prisoners have talked about such threats. In some cases these threats have been implemented. These prisoners were put to share their prison cell with criminals who had had rape records. Such practices are not easily talked about by prisoners and many refrain from discussing them. In one reported incident, a student who had committed suicide in prison is said to have done this because he had been raped in his prison cell.

Most political and journalist prisoners are questioned about immoral and sexual behavior. Many are forced to make false confessions about such acts. In one such case, a woman human rights activist was forced to “confess” about having sexual relations with a student activist, who happened to be her close relative.

Such accusations never make it to the court hearings and their purpose seems to be simply to threat and then to break the prisoner. After such accusations, prison officials find it easy to impose other accusations against the person. In many cases where such acts are the only “crimes” these individuals are accused of, the case never goes to the court and the purpose appears to simply be to silence these activists or individuals on their release. For their release, prisoners are required to present a lien to the judicial authorities in the form of a deed of title to a property which are kept by the officials as ransom. These liens remain a threatening stick in the hands of the prison officials, creating fear among the released prisoners.

Not only are prisoners in Iran widely tortured, but the existence of some 130,000 prisoners while the official capacity of prisons in the country is half that figure, is by itself a form of torture on them. For example, Zahedan city prison is holding prisoners numbering five times its official capacity. And while Iranian judiciary and law enforcement officials have repeatedly sent orders banning physical torture in their detention centers, they still say that if such practices exist they must be stopped. Nobody makes any reference to the scope of such practices in the prisons. Human rights activists say that if torture is really to be eliminated, it needs a serious effort by the highest officials of the country. The orders and decrees that are issued in this regard are more for public opinion purposes and for use in international forums to support the claims that such practices are being combated by the officials.