UN Urged to Take Action for Jafar Kazemi, Political Prisoner on Death Row
May 17, 2010
DEUTSCH (ähnlicher Artikel zum Thema)
ITALIAN
In a letter, Jafar Kazemi’s wife has urged the United Nation’s Secretary General and the UNHCR Commissioner to help save her husband who is at imminent risk of execution.
RAHANA – Jafar Kazemi was arrested on September 18, 2009 and sentenced to death. In a letter written to the United Nation’s secretary general and published by HRDAI, Kazemi’s wife describes the family’s ordeal since her husband’s arrest.
The following is the English translation of Roudabeh Akbari’s letter:
My name is Roudabeh Akbari. I am a housewife, married to the political prisoner Jafar Kazemi, and a mother of two children.
My husband was arrested on September 18, 2009 at 6:00am on Haft-Hoz Street in Tehran. We did not hear from him for two weeks. He was tortured for three days and then placed in solitary confinement for 74 days under harsh conditions.
My husband was accused of supporting and propagandizing for the Mojahedin Khalq Organization (MKO), as well as visiting our son in Camp Ashraf (MKO camp in Iraq).
In prison, after being tortured and spending three months in solitary confinement, he was pressured to make televised confessions. Faced with his resistance, they then tortured him again, and three of his teeth were broken as a result of severe beatings. Presently, my husband remains in a worrisome physical and emotional state.
At the end of the initial trial, during which judge Moghiseh sentenced him to death, my husband’s lawyer verbally objected to the ruling, which he argued was excessive and unlawful for the existing charge of anti-state propaganda. The judge remarked that he was under pressure at that time by higher authorities to rule in this fashion.
According to my husband’s lawyer, during the second trial, the court did not even look at the defense statement, which contained three pages of arguments regarding the anti-state propaganda charge, and in a two-line ruling, upheld the initial court’s ruling (death sentence). Judge Zargar was the judge who presided over the appeals hearing.
The interrogator has told my husband that “we need to sacrifice a few in order to save the regime and your name has been drawn as one of them.” My husband was asked again to make an interview about the Ashura events on December 27, 2009, but he refused to comply as was arrested three months before Ashura. The interrogators threatened that if he refused to make the confession, they would torture his wife and his children before his eyes.
In spite of threats by the interrogators that they would cut his wife in pieces before his eyes, he continued to resist making any confessions in the interview. The interrogators reacted by telling my husband that his execution was final and would be enforced. After 74 days of solitary confinement in ward 209, he was held in a place they call the suite, before being moved one week later to ward 350.
For three weeks, despite repeated attempts by me and my younger child, they refused to let us visit him.
Which law, country, or ethics states that visiting one’s child is a crime? If the Islamic Republic considers visiting your children a crime punishable by death, then my husband is guilty.
Given the critical situation of the political prisoners, and considering the total lack of will to review the inhumane and illegal court rulings against innocent prisoners, I demand the immediate stay of execution for those have been sentenced to death.
What I described above does not only apply to my husband and our family. All the families of political prisoners are in the same excruciating psychological situation. All the families of political prisoners want immediate action from the United Nations and the UNHCR commissioner.
Yours truly,
Roudabeh Akbari, wife of political prisoner Jafar Kazemi
May 2010
No comments:
Post a Comment