The unending list of Bloggers, Students, and Journalists under Prosecution in Iran (Part I)

Shahram Kholdi, ScanIranic:

Despite the fact that Nema Milaninia's alarming piece on Freethoughts.org on the situation of Ganji has not led to a substantial debate, during the past two weeks I have arrived at similar conclusions.

I have to conclude at this point that one can identify a pattern of reinforced prosecution of journalists, webloggers, and students activists with intensified action since October. This is definitely the continuation of the attack on the freedom of speech and civil society activism that started in 1999, but appears to receive a great deal of local attention rather than national or global.

In this post, I will be presenting my observations about the type of media coverage that such violations have received. This is just a preview for now. Perhaps, the contribution of the Khatami's administration to the expansion of the media in the cyberspace in its first mandate is more responsible for what we know and can know about these cases. Indeed, you can see how the mushrooming of many cyber news agencies from various ideological stripes in Iran, which started under Khatami's mandate, has been crucial to the reporting of these state-sponsored violations of human rights. READ MORE

The following a short list of all the people who are being called to the courts since late October. The scale by which the list is growing might provide (if coupled with more detailed research) provide a model about two important aspects of political prosecution in Iran:

1) The direction of the past prosecutions, the changing nature of the charges as a given case is heard by the revolution court and/or when it is appealed,

2) The duration of the apeal, prolongation of arrest injunctions while the accused still awaits the finalization of the court proceeding, conviction, and sentencing.

Many of these cases have been around since the last year of President Khatami's administration. Many of them bear the stain of the hardliner's long lasting counter attack against the many weeklies, monthlies, and newspapers around the country. Yet the more one digs through the many online media, the more one discovers of consistent prosecution of student activists across the country, which follows the same Mortazavi style of persecution and inquisition.

The students' prosecution could be because of a wide range of alleged charges, such as insulting to the officials, attempt to overthrow the regime, or even worse being heretic/blasphemous towards the Islamic notables and fundamental tenets of Islam. These students, who either wrote in some university-based paper, or on a weblog, or were arrested for reasonse related to freedom of speech.

3) The Iranian medias reporting of these persecutions (yes I know they are "proseuctions" but the systematic harrassement of these young students and their older press/journalist counterparts really constitutes a pattern of persecution) has been as sketchy as ever.

3-A) Ever since that Dr. Fateh has left ISNA, the ISNA news agency is no longer a very reliable source. For some reason, their coverage of the religious nationalists' cases, webloggers and journalists has been really reduced to a few scattered headlines.

3-B) Conservative/hardliners media outlets that have mushroomed in the aftermath of HEPD (His Excellency Dr. Ahmadinejad's election) do not even bother to report on these cases. They are more concerned with attacking the reformists' record than anything as boring as "human rights" for those who they mostly identify as the pupper of the west.

3-C) Sharq online, Rooydad, and Rooz online are certainly amongst the best sources to follow-up such news as the ones that concerns human rights activists most, but again they are more concerned with the politics of power in the Islamic Republic than a good coverage of human rights violations conducted in disguise of judicial prosecutions.

4-D) As it stands now, ILNA, Tabriz News, and Alborz are doing a much better job of reporting human rights violations conducted in disguise of judicial prosecutions.

Still, the fact that one can collect so much and re-distribute around the world about the state of many prosecuted webloggers and activists (students or jouranlists) through visiting, and conducting a good deal of intra-site searches, is quite a lot; an achievement for which, in all fairness, one has to credit Khatami's

For the names of the sites simply google them please. I have my own reasons for not linking them at this point.....they are not difficult to guess....to be continued further soon.