Reporters without Borders

Iran - Annual Report 2007

Dozens of journalists were arrested in 2006 forcriticising the authorities and some were imprisonedin secret in difficult conditions without access to alawyer. Fewer journalists are in jail but several arethe targets of endless legal procedures and dailythreats in the course of their work.

Since coming to power in August 2005,ultra-conservative President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad andhis team of mainly former leaders of the RevolutionaryGuards and the intelligence services have cracked downhard on journalists. In 2006, 38 journalists werearrested and a dozen media-outlets censored. Two werearrested in May in northern Iran after publication ofa cartoon of a cockroach speaking Azeri. Four otherswere picked up soon afterwards for reporting on theanger of the country’s Azeri minority.

Many journalists were also held in secret, withouteven basic rights. Shirko Jahani, who works for theTurkish news agency Euphrates in Mahabad (northwesternIran), was summoned on 27 November by the townprosecutor who immediately detained him for givinginterviews about human rights in Kurdistan to foreignmedia. He began a hunger-strike in protest and refusedto pay bail of 5 million tumen (€5,500). At the end ofthe year he was still in Mahabad prison.

Several media-outlets were physically attacked duringthe year. Government organisations and koranic schoolsransacked and set fire to the offices of the weeklyTamadone Hormozgan in the southern town of BandarAbbas in February after seven of its journalists werecharged with “insulting Ayatollah Khomeini.”Demonstrations were also staged by mullahs in thesouthern town of Busheir on 13 October in front of theoffices of the weekly Safir Dashtestan, which hadcarried an article making fun of the country’s“supreme guide,” Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

Self-censorship is still the best way to survive formany media-outlets. The regime’s leaders, socialtaboos, women’s rights and regional ethnic demands areout-of-bounds topics. Self-censorship partly explainsthe fewer journalists sent to prison. Those jailed areoften conditionally released but cannot work freelybecause they could be imprisoned again at any momentfor writing something that displeases the regime. Suchlegal pressures forced some to go abroad.

The government proposed a law in 2006 that would forcemedia workers to register with the ministry of cultureand Islamic guidance.

One journalist murdered in disturbing circumstances

Ayfer Serçe, a Kurdish-origin Turkish journalist ofthe Euphrates news agency, was killed in late July bythe Iranian army in Keleres, in the northwesternprovince of Azerbaijan. She first appeared to havedied during an operation against Kurdish rebels butevidence received by Reporters Without Borders showedshe had been killed on her way to the border afterfinishing her assignment. She had gone to the regionin early July to investigate a spate of suicides byKurdish women. The Iranian authorities refused toexplain how she died or return her body to her family.

Three years after Iranian-Canadian journalist ZahraKazemi was arrested and murdered after photographingfamilies of prisoners outside Teheran’s Evin prison,her killers have still not been identified.

Akbar Ganji freed after six years

Journalist Akbar Ganji, editor of the weekly Rah-é-Noand contributor to several reformist dailies, wasfreed on 18 March after spending six years in prisonfor “undermining state security,” “insulting thefounder of the Islamic republic and its sacred values”and “making propaganda against the Islamic Republic.”He had also been prosecuted for his revelations aboutthe 1998 murders of intellectuals and oppositionfigures and his accusations against top politicianssuch as Ali Fallahian and Hashemi Rafsandjani.

He had been kept in solitary confinement and staged ahunger-strike for more than two months in 2005 in abid to win his release. After he was freed, he held apress conference at the Reporters Without Bordersheadquarters in Paris when he stressed that the humanrights should figure in all discussions the rest ofthe world had with Iran. He warned that the economicinterests involved could obscure this issue.

Repression of bloggers seems to have declined in 2006.Whereas around 20 were imprisoned in 2004, none is injail at the moment. But Internet filtering has steppedup and Iran today boasts of filtering 10 million"immoral" websites. Pornographic sites, politicalsites and those dealing with religion are usually theones most targeted. But since the summer of 2006, thecensors have concentrated on online publicationsdealing with women’s rights. The authorities alsorecently decided to ban broadband connections. Thiscould be explained by a concern not to overload thevery poor-quality Iranian network, but it could alsobe motivated by a desire to prevent the downloading ofWestern cultural products such as films and songs.
 


by: www.rsf.org