The whole world needs to know about Nasrin Sotoudeh, the Iranian rights lawyer who was ultimately sentenced to 6 years in prison after the Islamic Republic convicted her of spreading propaganda and conspiring to harm state security in 2011.
Sotoudeh’s husband Reza Khandan told PBS Newshour [...]]]>
The whole world needs to know about Nasrin Sotoudeh, the Iranian rights lawyer who was ultimately sentenced to 6 years in prison after the Islamic Republic convicted her of spreading propaganda and conspiring to harm state security in 2011.
Sotoudeh’s husband Reza Khandan told PBS Newshour in November that his wife’s conviction was politically motivated. “In general, the idea was to prevent the lawyers from going to court and following up on human rights cases,” he said.
On December 5, Sotoudeh ended a 49-day hunger strike after the Iranian authorities agreed to lift a travel ban on her 12-year-old daughter. Sotoudeh was said to have been in deteriorating health at the time of her strike’s end.
Today, Sotoudeh and film-maker Jafar Panahi, another jailed dissident also sentenced to 6 years imprisonment, were unable to collect the EU’s annual Sakharov Prize for freedom of thought. At the award ceremony Iranian rights activist Shirin Ebadi, who Sotoudeh legally represented when they were both living in Iran, condemned the Iranian government’s suppression of its citizens.
“These two empty chairs are the sign of the Islamic republic regime’s behavior with its own citizens, a regime which for more than 30 years has continued to rule via suppressing the people,” said Ebadi.
In a letter that appeared on her husband’s Facebook page today, Sotoudeh reportedly explained that her protest was not only for her own family’s safety. “My daughter, like every other child at this age and not more than other children, has the right to live without the fear of threats and punishment,” said the letter.
The letter also expressed “hope that the punishment of families is removed from the policy of threats and pressure.”
Sotoudeh’s case has been cited as a violation of human rights by numerous rights-monitoring bodies including Amnesty International and the United Nations. It has also resulted in several campaigns about her struggle.
]]>Leahy also noted that he won’t accept the argument that the federal government can’t afford to financially assist rebuilding efforts in states that have been hit hard by the hurricane when billions have been spent on wars in Iraq and Afghanistan:
SEN. PATRICK LEAHY: Well, we don’t have all the figures in yet. It will be costly. You know, it’ll be a big burden for a state of only 660,000 people. So we will need federal disaster area. But we’re not the only ones. Every state hit from the Carolinas up are going to feel it.
Now I take it with a bit of a grain of salt, some of the debate on whether we could afford, as a nation, the money for this. We’ve spent — we’re spending several billion dollars a week in Afghanistan. We spend billions, hundreds of billions of dollars in Iraq, a war we never should have been in.
Now if we can spend, well, eventually amount to several trillion dollars in wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and then say, well, we can’t afford to help Americans in America? No, I can’t accept that, and I can’t imagine anybody that could.
His comments are particularly piercing when considering a report released earlier this month by the International Crisis Group which says that violence is currently at its worse in Afghanistan since the 2001 war began and that
The report authors also argue that there is “no possibility” that “any amount of international assistance to the Afghan National Security Forces (ANSF) will stabilise the country” before 2014 when most foreign forces will have withdrawn “unless there are significant changes in international strategies, priorities and programs.”
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