Rights activist jailed by Iran seeks medical treatment

TEHRAN, Iran — Jailed Iranian human rights activist and journalist Narges Mohammadi, who suffers from a lung condition, has requested temporary release from prison for medical treatment, her lawyer tells AFP.

Mahmoud Behzadi-Rad says he’s also preparing a new parole application for Mohammadi, a previous request having been denied in late 2019.

But the activist faced new legal proceedings and was “under investigation” as part of a dossier with unspecified contents, for which no “indictment has… yet been issued,” he says.

Since March, more than 100,000 detainees in Iran have been granted temporary release or sentence remissions to help limit the spread of the novel coronavirus in the Islamic Republic’s prisons.

Mohammadi, 48, is a campaigner against the death penalty and was the spokeswoman for the Defenders of Human Rights Center in Iran — founded by lawyer and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Shirin Ebadi — when she was arrested in May 2015.

The mother-of-two is serving a 10-year prison sentence for “forming and managing an illegal group”, among other charges.

According to the international press freedom organization Reporters Without Borders (RSF), she was “forcibly” transferred in late December from Evin prison in Tehran, where she had been held since 2015, to Zanjan in northwest Iran.

— AFP