Severe physical and psychological torture to recent detainees in Erdebil

Article 5 of the Univeral Human Rights Declaration expressly states that “No one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.” This principle has also been confirmed in the Constitution of the Islamic Republic of Iran expressly stating that “It is illegal to obtain confession or any information by resorting to any kind of torture.”

Notwithstanding the above, in recent weeks, we have been witnessing waves of detention of Southern Azerbaijani activists, students and journalists, as well as mounting pressures exerted on political activists. There follows a briefing on the events.

Erdebil was the scene for the surprise attacks by security agents of the Ministry of Information on 1 April 2008, as a result of which large numbers were rounded up in their houses, offices, streets and public places. The families of the vitims were informed of their wherabouts only weeks afterwards.

Today, it is 14 days since the detention of Erdeshir Kerimi Khiyavi, the president of the Islamic Student Society of the Open University of Erdebil; Behruz Elizade, a human rights activist; Rehim Qulami, a writer, and journalist; and Vedud Seadeti, an activist of civil liberty in Erdebil. They have been subjected to severe physical and psychological torture, have been deprived of the right of access to a lawyer and other rights conferred to prisoners, and their families have been threatened.

When they were transferred to prison from detention, they were able to contact their families for the first time. They were then able to inform their familes of the dreadful ordeal that they had been through to falsely confess to the dictated terms including severe torture and ceaseless threats.

According to their statements, the interrogations for obtaining false confessions involved “beating up and kicking, flogging by using cables, electrocution and inflicting eletric shocks, hanging from feet for hours, being kept in solitary confinement, being kept sleepless and enduring insults and degrading conditions.

Presently, the safety of these prisoners of conscience have been undermined due to harsh prison conditions, as well as due to their hunger strike, which was their last resort of protest to thier ordeal.

Erdeshir Kerimi is now suffering from neural and nerve conditions, also Rehim Qulami is suffering from kidney problems, both of whom are deprived of the right of access to medical care.

On behalf of the Committee against Torture to Southern Azerbaijani Prisoners of Conscience in Iran, we express our concern against the torture of the above named victims, who are currently jailed in Erdebil prison. We appeal to the media, the organisations concerned with human rights defence and to the groups campaiging against torture. We rally for the mobilisation of your campaign against these illegal imprisonments, repressions of civil liberty activists and imprisonment of journalists in Southern Azerbaijani.

Let us also be reminded that confession under torture is void and illegal and we call upon the punishment of the culprits.