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Maryam Kashani ‎
m.kashani@roozonline.com

While efforts by activists and prominent figures to overturn the harsh 30-month prison sentence ‎for women's rights activist Delaram Ali have failed, another woman activist, Hanna Abdi, was ‎arrested yesterday in Kurdistan. She is a friend and colleague of Roonak Safazadeh, who was ‎arrested a month ago and transferred to an undisclosed location. ‎

After the court of appeals upheld Delaram Ali's original conviction, a group of mothers of ‎women's right activists, led by Delaram Ali's mother, met with officials from the judiciary ‎yesterday asking them to overturn the sentence. According to Zanestan website, "These mothers ‎took the letter written by Delaram Ali's mother and several other mothers to the head of the ‎judiciary. But judicial officials displayed indifference to their pleas and rejected their requests to ‎promptly process the case." ‎

The same report on the website adds that, "Mothers who wanted to deliver Delaram Ali’s ‎message to the head of Iran’s judiciary were ignored for six hours in the hallways of the judiciary ‎building in downtown Tehran." ‎

Meanwhile, at a press conference titled "Women's Rights," held at the Center for Defenders of ‎Human Rights, Nobel Laureate Shirin Ebadi referred to Delaram Ali's case as an "Clear ‎instance" of the regime's violation of women's rights under the guise of protecting national ‎security. Ebadi said, "Women who are put on trial are accused of undermining national security ‎and conspiring to overthrow the regime because they voice their human needs. Iranian courts do ‎not have the courage to admit that they are convicting a woman who is willing to stand up and ‎say I have rights as a person. They thus label her as a conspirator against national security." ‎

Shirin Ebadi added, "These prison sentences will end one day. I am speaking to that court which ‎did not have the courage to say that it convicted this woman just because she had said that she ‎opposed her husband taking on a second wife. I am speaking to people who insult women, who ‎send an educated woman, a doctor, to prison because she was walking on the street with a male ‎colleague and speaking to him. I am talking about this particular woman in the town of ‎Hamedan whose battered body was delivered to her family merely 30 minutes after she had ‎spoken to her family members who attest that she was in perfect emotional spirits. And you want ‎me to believe that she had committed suicide? How many Zahra Kazemi's are there?" [Zahra ‎Kazemi was the Iranian-Canadian journalist visiting Iran who had been tortured to death in Evin ‎prison, while officials denied the view.]‎

Shirin Ebadi continued, "We go onto the streets to simply express our happiness. It is after all ‎women's day. But did you see what they did there? This same Delaram Ali, who drank the ‎hemlock, as did Socrates, and submitted herself to prison when she was called to do so, had her ‎wrist broken by the police on the day she was peacefully marching on the streets of Tehran. We ‎showed the opinion of medical experts to the judiciary officials, we showed pictures, we revealed ‎testimony, and we filed a complaint against the police chief. Do you know what happened next? ‎The head of police came to court and said that these women were participating in an illegal ‎gathering. First of all, peaceful gatherings are not against the law. Assuming that the police chief ‎was right in believing that the gathering lacked a permit, does the police have the right to break a ‎person’s wrist? And now they tell this girl to go to prison." ‎