US Academic Who Was Jailed By Iran Sues Princeton University
An American academic who was imprisoned in Iran for 1,216 days is suing Princeton University, saying they sent him to study and then left him there without any support.
An American academic who was imprisoned in Iran for 1,216 days is suing Princeton University, saying they sent him to study and then left him there without any support.
Xiyue Wang says the university officials did not help him, and even tried to keep his wife from publicizing his case following his arrest on bogus charges of spying for the United States.
Princeton lawyers and administrators urged him not to seek refuge in the Swiss embassy in Tehran after he began to fear for his safety so that the university could maintain its political relations with Iran, Wang alleges in his lawsuit.
He has identified Princeton scholar Seyyed Hossein Mousavian, who is sympathetic to the Iranian regime, claiming that he stymied efforts to free him from prison.
Mousavian – now a visiting research scholar at Princeton, was Tehran’s ambassador to Germany when four Iranian dissidents were assassinated at Berlin's Mykonos restaurant in 1992.
He served in a variety of positions Iranian diplomatic position. He attended the funeral service of Qasem Soleimani, the IRGC commander who was killed by American forces last year.
Xiyue Wang was arrested in Iran in August 2016 and sentenced to 10 years in the notorious Evin Prison. He was freed in December 2019 in exchange for Iranian scientist Masoud Soleimani, who was imprisoned in the US, for attempting to export biological materials to Iran without authorization.
The Secretary of Iran's High Council for Human Rights, Kazem Gharibabadi, made the remarks in reaction to a recent human rights resolution passed by United Nations General Assembly condemning the "alarmingly frequent" use of capital punishment, including against juvenile offenders, torture, and arbitrary arrests in Iran.
Gharibabadi, a former ambassador to international organizations in Vienna, said the executions of juveniles do not violate human rights, underlining that there is no compulsory international law prohibiting the practice.
Although no official data about the number of Iranian children in death row is publicly available, the UN has criticized Iran as one of the most prolific executioner of juveniles in the world, with some reports putting the numbers at about 100 a year on average.
“There are currently over 85 juvenile offenders on death row in Iran, sentenced to death following processes that significantly violate international human rights law. The majority of those sentenced to death are from marginalized groups or are individuals who themselves have been victims of abuse”, read part of a November statement by the Office of the High Commissioner for UN Human Rights.
UN human rights experts issued the statement to condemn the execution of Arman Abdolali, who was convicted for an alleged murder committed when he was 17. Arman was executed at dawn on November 24 after being transferred to solitary confinement the previous evening.
While the death penalty is not officially banned by the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) or virtually any other universal treaty, there are several instruments in force to push states to abolish capital punishment, according to the Death Penalty Information Center, a Washington-based non-profit organization that focuses on disseminating studies and reports on the capital punishment.
The ICCPR -- one of the three international treaties collectively referred to as the International Bill of Human Rights — mandates that the death penalty “shall not be imposed for crimes committed by persons below eighteen years of age.”
In most countries a minor is defined as a person under the age of majority – generally 18 -- which legally demarcates childhood from adulthood. Adulthood in the Islamic law (or Sharia) is the time when someone reaches puberty or maturity. According to Sharia, people are considered innocent before that and don’t have full responsibility and Islamic law is not applied to them. However, the concept of minor is not clearly defined and differs based on the interpretation of different Islamic jurists.
