Iranian lawyer and activist Nasrin Sotoudeh was made honorary citizen of the City of Paris on April 1, 2019. -

Arash Ashourinia

Iranian lawyer Nasrin Sotoudeh, winner of the Sakharov Prize imprisoned in her country, is in her fourth week of hunger strike to draw international attention to the plight of political prisoners in her country.

Co-winner of the 2012 prize awarded by the European Parliament, she was sentenced in 2019 to 12 years in prison after defending a woman arrested for demonstrating against the imposition of the veil on Iranian women.

She is being held in Evin prison in Tehran with other political prisoners, including French researcher Fariba Adelkhah.

Ms. Sotoudeh's husband, Reza Khandan, announced on social media that she began her hunger strike on August 11, relaying a statement from his wife denouncing the conditions of incarceration of political prisoners held for "unlikely reasons." »And their judicial horizon blocked, while the Covid is wreaking havoc in the country.

"She found no other way than a hunger strike"

She says her hunger strike is aimed at securing the release of political prisoners, who have not benefited from the release offered to tens of thousands of common law detainees released due to the pandemic.

"She found no other way than to go on hunger strike and put her life on the line to plead for the release of people who should never have ended up in prison," said Hadi Ghaemi, executive director of the Center for Human Rights in Iran (CHRI), based in New York.

"With the spread of Covid in prisons, she draws attention to the critical situation of thousands of political prisoners like her, in a situation of extreme vulnerability, and completely ignored by the government and the judicial system," he said. he told AFP.

"Unprecedented repression"

He believes that Iran is going through a phase of "unprecedented repression", with thousands of arrests in recent months for political reasons.

The country was rocked by international sanctions, then by major protests against price hikes in November 2019, which, according to opponents, resulted in the most severe repression since the Shah's overthrow in 1979.

The NGO Amnesty International published a report last week claiming to have taken the testimonies of 500 people, arrested after the protests, and who were victims of abusive legal proceedings, claiming that there had been an "epidemic" of torture in prisons, including by sham drowning and sexual assault.

In another report, the Washington-based Abdorrahman Boroumand Center for Human Rights in Iran (ABC) found the spread of Covid-19 in prisons to be far greater than Iranian authorities admit. , accusing them of not applying the necessary hygiene measures.

“The prisoners discuss with their co-detainees, make requests to the guards, to the prison officials.

But nothing is happening.

They write letters, and nothing happens.

So, they still have the hunger strike, ”according to ABC official Roya Boroumand.

"Exposed to the worst consequences"

Ms. Sotoudeh's health is becoming worrying according to her husband, according to whom she is weakening and refusing injections from the prison.

"We are saddened to see Nasrin's health deteriorating day after day as she is imprisoned on unfair charges," said Karin Deutsch Karlekar, an official with the freedom advocacy NGO Pen America, which awarded an award to Ms. Sotoudeh in 2011.

“She is now exposed to the worst consequences of her activism,” she said.

On Tuesday, the association of German judges DRB awarded her its prize for human rights, calling her "a symbol of the Iranian movement for civil rights", wanting to alert public opinion to her case.

And it has echoed in a particularly sinister tone for a few days and the death of Ebru Timtik, a Turkish lawyer, after 238 days of hunger strike in the prisons of the country of Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

She was accused of terrorism, which she has always vehemently contested.

Turkey's Supreme Court on Thursday ordered the release of another lawyer jailed on a hunger strike for 213 days, a week after the death of his colleague.

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