Abram Paley, Deputy to the Iran Special Representative, has called for the immediate release of Nobel Peace Prize laureate Narges Mohammadi and all those “unjustly imprisoned in Iran.”
The statement, conveyed through an X message on Friday, emphasized the importance of upholding human rights and fundamental freedoms.
“We again call for the release of Nobel Peace Prize laureate Narges Mohammadi and all those unjustly imprisoned in Iran. No one should be held behind bars for exercising their human rights and fundamental freedoms,” Paley stated, highlighting the urgency of the matter.
The appeal coincides with the one-year anniversary of the Without Just Cause campaign launched by the US State Department. The campaign aims to draw global attention to the plight of political prisoners unlawfully detained worldwide, sharing their stories and increasing pressure for their release.
The campaign's statement revealed that approximately one million individuals are currently political prisoners. Among them are people detained for exercising human rights, fundamental freedoms, or due to factors such as race, religion, ethnicity, or sexual orientation.
The featured individuals in the Without Just Cause initiative represent a diverse group of victims, including faith leaders, civic activists, businesspeople, and former government officials. Among them Mohammadi, born in 1972, stands as a symbol of resilience and advocacy.
Mohammadi has received several international awards, including the Sakharov Prize from the American Physical Society in 2018, the International Press Freedom Award in 2016, and the Alexander Langer Award in 2009. Despite her accolades, she has faced multiple arrests, trials, and years of imprisonment due to her unwavering commitment to human rights. Her most recent arrest occurred in 2021, and she has since been held in Evin Prison.
Two Iran-Iraq war veterans showed up at the university where Fatemeh Hashemi was teaching. They warned her that there were those who wanted to kill her father, former President Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, and kill him in such a way that everyone would believe it was a natural death.
“I asked them why should some people want to kill my father? They said because they are worried about [what would happen] after Mr. Khamenei,” the eldest daughter said in an interview with the reformist Etemad daily that was published Thursday.
Mystery still surrounds Rafsanjani's death, a relatively pragmatist revolutionary cleric. The influential politician's body was discovered in a swimming pool near his office on January 8, 2017. Officially, his death was attributed to drowning following a cardiac arrest, with no witnesses present at the time.
Rafsanjani's family has repeatedly raised concerns that he might have been murdered. They point to several suspicious circumstances, including delays in getting him to the hospital, the lack of access to CCTV footage from the swimming pool and his office, the absence of a post-mortem examination despite their requests, a rushed burial, and the disappearance of highly confidential documents, including diaries and his last will and testament, from his office safe shortly after his death.
In 2019, Fatemeh Hashemi had spoken of the visit of the two men whose identity she said was unknown to her but had never suggested that the alleged murder of her father had any connection to the leadership challenges in the regime. She had also said that she reported the warning to her father and after his death, to the Supreme National Security Council (SNSC), which she said, did not follow up on the matter.
At the time of Rafsanjani’s death, two others were considered potential challengers to leadership after Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei’s death: The ultra-hardliner Ayatollah Mohammad-Taghi Mesbah-Yazdi and Khamenei’s own son, Mojtaba, who some pundits speculated was being groomed to succeed his father. The elusive Mojtaba has long been referred to by hardliners as an Ayatollah to denote his high clerical rank.
Mesbah-Yazdi, who was a fundamentalist ideologue advocating the absolute rule of the jurisconsult (Velayat-e Faqih, or Supreme Leader), passed away in January 2021 at the age of 83. He enjoyed much influence among the top brass of the Revolutionary Guard (IRGC) and political hardliners.
Mesbah-Yazdi and Rafsanjani were both members of the Assembly of Experts, an eighty-eight-member clerical body responsible for appointing a new Supreme Leader and supervising his activities. However, this constitutional provision has largely remained inactive over the years, as Khamenei has filled the assembly with loyalists.
Rafsanjani lost much of his former influence in the assembly after 2009 and was replaced by another high-ranking cleric, Mohammad-Reza Mahdavi-Kani when he withdrew from the elections in 2011.
Rafsanjani had played an instrumental role in the accession of Ali Khamenei to leadership in 1989 by convincing the Assembly of Experts that being a religious source of emulation (marja’-e taghlid) -- a qualification that Khamenei lacked -- was not considered as a leadership requirement. He also claimed that the late leader, Ruhollah Khomeini, had once suggested Khamenei’s name as his successor.
Khamenei and Rafsanjani, however, had a significant falling out when Khamenei publicly endorsed Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's presidential candidacy in 2009, going against all other rival candidates, including Rafsanjani. In a significant speech, Khamenei expressed that Ahmadinejad's views were "closer" to his own than those of any other candidate, including his "friend of fifty years," Rafsanjani.
“After 2016 [Rafsanjani] openly said here and there that he had made a mistake in choosing Khamenei [as leader],” Berlin-based political analyst Mehdi Mahdavi-Azad told Iran International, pointing out that according to people close to Rafsanjani, including his daughters and his advisor Gholam-Ali Rajaei, around the same time pressures had increased on him and there had been warnings of a threat to his life.
Mahdavi-Azad also highlighted a Khamenei speech on the day that Rafsanjani died, which could be interpreted as an attack on him and questioning his revolutionary credentials.
Playing with Rafsanjani's first name, Akbar, which means bigger or older, Khamenei suggested that the Islamic Republic could be harmed if a “reprobate or misled brother” turned out to be the “bigger Satan” and played the role of the real Satan in misleading the people. “We must be vigilant, this person is our enemy, too,” he said.
During the funeral prayers for Rafsanjani, Khamenei's omission of a sentence that traditionally attests to God that the deceased had displayed nothing but "benevolence and goodness" during his life attracted significant attention.
Mahdavi-Azad told Iran International that based on the evidence of a cover up and allegations made by the family, who insist Rafsanjani could not have died a normal death, Khamenei should be held responsible for ordering his killing.
