"Listen well: and one, two, three!"

: A group of prisoners from Evin prison in Tehran then forcefully begin the revolutionary song "Bella ciao" in Farsi, while the daughter of one of the prisoners records them on the other end of the telephone.

"One for all and all for one!", They laugh and applaud each other, in an act of defiance and support for the protest movement in Iran, despite the risks involved.

The sound extract of this telephone conversation, striking, dates from January.

It was posted on social media by the daughter of one of the prisoners and has become a symbol of the courage of the women detained in this Tehran prison – notorious for its extremely difficult conditions – and their willingness to continue their support for the movement. .

Many of them, like environmental activist Niloufar Bayani, arrested in 2018, have been detained for years.

Others have spent the last ten years of their lives being imprisoned, released, and then reincarcerated.

Some of his wives were arrested long before the protest movement – ​​of which women are at the forefront – sparked by the death on September 16 of Mahsa Amini, a young Iranian Kurd, after his arrest in Tehran by the morality police. who accused her of breaking the strict dress code requiring women to wear the veil in public.   

"Media stunt"

The number of female prisoners in Evin has continued to swell since the repression of this movement.

Several women have been released in recent weeks, including Alieh Motalebzadeh, a journalist and women's rights activist whose daughter posted the viral audio clip of "Bella ciao", and French-Iranian researcher Fariba Adelkhah, arrested in Iran in June 2019 and sentenced to five years in prison for undermining national security. 

Tehran had announced shortly before a pardon in favor of a "significant number" of convicts.

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But human rights defenders called the pardon a "media stunt" and several famous activists are still imprisoned there, including human rights activist Narges Mohammadi, environmental defenders Sepideh Kashani and Niloufar Bayani - sentenced in 2020 to ten years in detention for "espionage" -, the activist for workers' rights Sepideh Gholian or the German-Iranian activist for human rights Nahid Taghavi.  

These women are deprived of their freedom because the Islamic Republic "trembles at their word", told AFP Jasmin Ramsey, deputy director of the Center for Human Rights in Iran (CHRI, based in New York).

"The headscarf is one of the pillars of the Islamic Revolution, as is the submission of women. They hate it when women make themselves heard and say + I can do whatever I want!". 

The revolution "stronger" than repression

CHRI has launched a petition, signed by nearly 40 human rights groups, and addressed to the current rotating EU presidency, Sweden, urging member states to summon Iranian ambassadors to their countries on the Day Women's International on March 8, to tell them "to stop imprisoning and perpetrating violence against women who claim their rights and fundamental freedoms in Iran" and to "end the physical and sexual violence against detainees and demonstrators".  

Narges Mohammadi, one of the women who sang "Bella ciao", has emerged in recent months as one of the most critical prisoners.

She denounced the prison conditions in Evin and supported the protests. 

#NargesMohammadi, Iranian human rights activist was sentenced in Tehran in 2016 to 16 years in prison for creating and leading "a human rights movement that campaigns for the abolition of the death penalty" .

pic.twitter.com/v3QhxzN72m

— Farid Vahid (@FaridVahiid) December 27, 2021

In December, she published an open letter from prison denouncing sexual assaults suffered by prisoners and evoking cases of rape of women during their interrogations.

>> To read also: Iranian Armita Abbasi, raped and tortured in prison, awaiting her verdict

"Women have demonstrated that they are the voices of change, freedom and equality. One of the reasons why Narges is still in prison is that the authorities fear her. They make them shudder," says Jasmin Ramsey, the assistant director of CHRI.

Sepideh Gholian, who is serving a five-year prison sentence for supporting a strike, described in a harrowing letter published by the BBC in Farsi in January the methods used by those carrying out the interrogations to lead to forced confessions, and the cries echoing through the prison.

"Today the sounds we hear... across Iran are louder than the screams from the interrogation rooms, it is the sound of revolution, the sound of truth: 'Woman. Vie.Liberté'", in reference to the slogan chanted in the demonstrations.  

With AFP

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