While the world has been fixated with the early weeks of the Trump presidency and the effects of that on crises such as that in Gaza and the war in Ukraine, issues in other human rights hotspots have been coming up with an all too familiar frequency. One of those places is Iran.
Pakhshan Azzizi
Amnesty International reported on 6th February that Iran’s Supreme Court had rejected the request for judicial review of the conviction and death sentence of humanitarian aid worker Pakhshan Azizi, 40, from Iran’s oppressed Kurdish ethnic minority.
Pakhshan Azizi was sentenced to death in July 2024, through the implementation of Branch 26 of the Revolutionary Court of Tehran. She was said to be convicted of “armed rebellion against the state” (baghi). Amnesty International have stated that this is in relation to her humanitarian activities and peaceful human rights activities.
By way of an example, Amnesty International states that between 2014 and 2022 Pakhshan was, “involved in providing humanitarian support to women and children displaced following attacks by the Islamic State armed group (IS) and sheltering in camps in northeast Syria and the Kurdistan Region of Iraq. In early January 2025, the Supreme Court upheld her conviction and death sentence. Her request for judicial review was subsequently rejected by Branch Nine of the Supreme Court”.
By way of response, Diana Eltahawy, Amnesty International’s Deputy Director for the Middle East and North Africa, said:
“The international community must immediately urge the Iranian authorities to halt the execution of arbitrarily detained humanitarian aid worker Pakhshan Azizi, who was sentenced to death following a grossly unfair trial before a Revolutionary Court last year.
“Pakhshan Azizi was detained solely in relation to her peaceful human rights and humanitarian activities, including providing humanitarian support to women and children in northeast Syria who were displaced following attacks by the Islamic State armed group.”
Mehdi Yarrahi
It was reported on 5th March by The Guardian, that Mehdi Yarrahi, had been given 74 lashes as part of an agreement to end a criminal case against him. Mehdi is a well-known Iranian protest singer who spoke out against the country’s strict dress code for women. It was further reported that, “Yarrahi was initially convicted in January 2024 of acting unlawfully by releasing a protest song in September 2023 entitled Your Headscarf (Roo Sarito) on the first anniversary of the “Women, Life, Freedom” uprising”. Yarrahi is also known for composing songs during the uprising in 2022, and is said to have more than 1 million followers on Instagram.
Food for thought and hope
Meanwhile, on a lighter note, it was reported on 9th March about the prison diary of Sepideh Gholian. Gholian was born in the south-west of Iran, in Dezful, Khuzestan. It has been noted that “In 2018, when she was still a student, she began helping to organise support for the Haft Tappeh sugarcane complex strike (since 2015, when the factory was privatised, workers had been fighting against job losses, unpaid wages and poor working conditions)”.
Gholian was not a worker herself, but she did report on the strike. She also planned meetings and built solidarity in the community and beyond – until she was arrested during a peaceful protest, after which she was detained without trial for 30 days.
Gholian was undaunted and on her release spoke of the beatings, floggings and sexual insults she had had to endure. She needed someone she could trust to tell her story in more detail. It was then that Gholian discovered IranWire, set up in 2013 by Maziar Bahari. It is reported that, “to date, IranWire has helped to train some 6,000 citizen journalists inside Iran, and it was thanks to this network that he heard Gholian was writing a prison diary – a book IranWire published in Farsi in 2020”.
Bahari said: “After that, she knew I was someone she could trust. So we stayed in touch as much as possible, and then she told me she had an idea for a second book, this time about cooking.”. So it was that piece by piece an amazing book of hope was delivered to IranWire and in April, it will be published in English as The Evin Prison Bakers’ Club: Surviving Iran’s Most Notorious Prison in 16 Recipes.
The stories that are told in the book are often appalling. In one of them, a woman has to secretly abort her baby in prison, but the solidarity it reveals somehow gives the narrative a real sense of hope. Included in the book is a description of the British-Iranian woman Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe baking cookies for her daughter; the women were imprisoned in the same prison in Tehran.
It has been noted that, “the women come from all social, ethnic and political backgrounds. Outside the prison, their unity would not be encouraged; many of them would doubtless never even cross paths”. With their baking and their solidarity in Evin Prison, Bahari says that the women are, “practising for the kind of Iran they’d like to see in the future”.
I asked Newcastle-based Iranian activist Parisa Panahi for her comments on these stories and the news from Iran in general: “Amidst the struggle for human rights in Iran, the unwavering courage of activists like Pakhshan Azizi shines a light on the urgent need for global solidarity and action against injustice.”
When will it end?
It has been over 45 years now, since the Islamic Revolution that toppled the Shah in 1979. It can seem like life in Iran has been as restricted and oppressive for ever and that it will also go like that forever.
However, situations do change and freedom does come to people, sometimes when it seems least likely to happen. To develop the theme put forward by Parisa above, global solidarity and courageous activism can see an end to the terrible suffering in Iran.
Let us all hope that it happens sooner rather than later.
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