PEN International and 35 other centers in the PEN literary and free expression network have condemned the detention and suppression of writers, poets and members of the Iranian Writers' Association.
In a statement published on Monday, they also demanded the immediate release of all those who are imprisoned after they protested, wrote or translated books and fought censorship.
“We call for the Iranian authorities to cease harassing and investigating members of the IWA, and unconditionally drop all politically-motivated charges against these writers,” reads the statement.
The Iranian regime intensified arrests of prominent writers and other artists, including award-winning filmmakers last year and especially after popular antigovernment protests broke out in September.
In another part of the statement, the signatories said they stand in solidarity with all writers in Iran and call for an end to the “severe” and “protracted” government crackdown on writers and the entire creative sector.
“We call for all writers jailed for their peaceful expression and words to be freed immediately and unconditionally, and for the international community and multilateral institutions such as the United Nations to pay special attention to the targeting of writers and the creative community in Iran.”
According to PEN America’s 2021 Freedom to Write Index Iran jailed the fourth highest number of writers and public intellectuals in the world and in 2022, arrests of writers and other artists have spiked dramatically.
Fatemeh Maghsoudi, representative of Boroujerd in the parliament, told the media Monday that attributing the poisonings to religious fundamentalists was “unfounded” but demanded shifting to online education until the mystery of the attacks is solved.
In a commentary published by Qom News on February 14, Nafiseh Moradi, an Islamic studies researcher at Tehran’s Al-Zahra University, speculated that the Taliban’s ban on girls’ education may have inspired the ultra-religious in Qom to carry out attacks on schools for girls to instill fear in students and their families with the aim of keeping them at home. The website was later blocked by the authorities for publishing the controversial claim.
Since then, many on social media have also attributed the school attacks to underground Shiite groups with beliefs similar to doomsday cults who are also infuriated by young female students’ anti-regime protests and refusal to wear the hijab.
Last week Attorney General Mohammad Javad Montazeri said in a letter to Qom prosecutor that the poisoning of students in Qom might be a “deliberate criminal act” and urged city officials to take decisive action in the case.
The first case which was reported in Qom on November 30 affected 18 students at a secondary school who fell ill with symptoms such as nausea, headaches, coughing, difficulty breathing, heart palpitations, and lethargy.
Poisonings, apparently by gas, were hushed for nearly two months but now they have spread to several other cities, particularly in Boroujerd, capital of the western Lorestan province, where several schools were hit in the past week.
Students of Ahmadieh High School in Boroujerd have said that something like a home-made bomb was thrown into the school yard that emitted a gas. Consequently, some of these students lost movement in their limbs and had to be hospitalized as were the school principal and her deputy.
Over a hundred were poisoned at 15 Khordad High School in the same city. There are reports of Tohid Middle School and Fereshtegan Primary being hit in Boroujerd in the past few days.
Isolated cases have also been reported, with very little detail, in Qazvin, and several other cities in different parts of the country.
Victims say they smelled something like bleach while others report smelling peppermint, bleach or rotten fruit before their symptoms emerged.
In response to claims on social media that Fatemeh Rezaei, an eleven-year-old girl, has died in Qom because of the poisonings, the state media on Sunday said the death of the schoolgirl in Qom had nothing to do with the school attacks.
The official news agency IRNA on Monday published an interview with the girl’s father who said the reports about his daughter’s death and its connection with the poisonings was fabricated by “anti-revolutionary media” based outside Iran. He said his daughter’s symptoms which led to her death from infection included leg pain, stomachache, vomiting and a temperature.
The interview reminded many of what is known to Iranians as “forced” confessions or statements.
Deputy education minister Younes Panahi said Sunday that the serial poisoning of female students in Qom and other cities were "intentional". "It was found that some people wanted all schools, especially girls' schools, to be closed." Later on the same day, he said he was misquoted about the incidents being “intentional poisonings”.
Panahi also insisted that the chemical compounds used to poison students were not of weapons-grade chemicals used in chemical wars and that aggressive treatments were not required for the symptoms that students have been suffering from.
Many seats were empty while Hossein-Amir Abdollahian was delivering his speech at UHRC’s headquarters in Geneva, following calls by activists urging delegates to walk out in reaction to the regime’s gross human rights violations, especially during the ongoing crackdown on antigovernment protests.
The current session of the council, made up of 47 member countries, will last for more than five weeks and is set to tackle an extensive array of human rights issues, including discrimination and freedom of religion, both major issues in Iran.
The council was one of the first international bodies to react to the current wave of protests, ignited by the death of Mahsa Amini in custody of hijab police. In November, the council voted to launch an independent investigation into the regime’s deadly repression, which has killed more than 500 civilians, including 70 children.
Most participants who left the hall in protest to Amir-Abdollahian's presence were members of NGOs as most diplomats preferred to stay and listen to the Islamic Republic’s rhetoric.
Trying to manipulate the realities on the ground, the Iranian FM said, “The peaceful assemblies that took place in my country following the sad death of Mahsa Amini... turned violent following the malign interference by some terrorist elements. In this respect, a number of Persian language TV channels based in the US and the UK, acted as provocateurs of hatred and propagators of violence.”
He also claimed that an investigation was ongoing and that all the people that were arrested during the protests have been released. He also claimed that "no one has been killed," in response to Iran International’s correspondent who asked him about the Islamic Republic's killing of protesters including a 10-year-old kid.
Outraged by Amir-Abdollahian's presence, many politicians and activists expressed concern about the UN’s move to invite the Iranian official for the opening day of the five-week session. Member of the Swedish parliament, Alireza Akhondi, said, “It’s a shameful day for the UN that they allowed representatives for a murderous regime to speak here about human rights.”
“I’m expecting that they (the UN) are redrawing their badges and they are not allowing them to enter this building anymore. Because they are not respecting the human rights of anybody and they are trying to harass and make the Iranian voices to not be able to be heard,” he added.
The foreign minister’s presence was not the only issue of contention among Iranian and foreign activists as he also held several meetings on the sidelines of the UN session, such as a meeting with the UN Secretary-General António Guterres, Belgian Foreign Minister Hadja Lahbib and Finnish Foreign Minister Pekka Haavisto.
The meetings shocked social media users, especially because Lahbib cut their hair in the country’s parliament in solidarity with anti-government demonstrations. Her meeting was criticized by many activists and officials, including Belgian lawmaker Darya Safai, who pointed out that “The Belgian government goes along with hostage diplomacy.” Lahbib herself tweeted about the release of Olivier Vandecasteele, an aid worker and a former employee of the Norwegian Refugee Council sentenced to 40 years in prison in Iran. Some believe her meeting with Amir-Abdollahian was probably an attempt to plead for his release.
