Hundreds Arrested in Iran as Judiciary Approves 'Preventative Detentions'

Hundreds of people have been arrested since protests against the Islamic Republic erupted in Iran last Friday, prompted by the death in custody of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini.

The campaign of arbitrary arrests intensified on Thursday after Chief Justice Gholamhossein Mohseni Ejei announced the judiciary had green-lit a policy of “preventative detentions” for the foreseeable future.

Follow Up Iran, a new consortium of activists monitoring the status of September 2022 detainees in Iran, has shared a list of names of those known to have been taken into custody since Mahsa’s burial last Friday.

Among them were 20 university students, 11 known women’s rights activists, three media professionals, and nine political activists. Among the detainees was Niloufar Hamedi, an Iranian journalist who wrote about Mahsa while she was in a coma in Kasra Hospital last week.

In its latest report on Thursday, the Kurdish human rights platform Hengaw claimed some 600 people of Kurdish origin had been detained in Iran in the past week, of whom it has been able to confirm the identities of 100.

Known vocal campaigners for social justice issues in Iran have received threatening telephone calls from security forces in the past few days, warning them to stay at home and not comment on the ongoing events.

Hanieh Daemi, the sister of children’s rights activist Atena Daemi, who was released from a long spell in Qarchak Prison earlier this year, was violently arrested on Friday together with her husband Hossein.

Atena, who has posted several times in support of the protesters on Twitter, wrote on Friday “Eight male officers raided Haniyeh’s home, bound Hossein’s hands and shoved him out of the house, searched it, arrested Haniyeh, and when she refused to pull down her hijab, they beat her and drove them away in two cars.”

Protests continued on Thursday night despite a massive deployment of police and security agents in many cities across the country.

Other people named as having been arrested in the past few days include:

• Political activist Majid Tavakoli
• University professor Abbas Bagheri Yarsani
• United Kurdish Front of Kermanshah secretary Siavash Hayati
• BA sociology student Behrouz Shirbeigi
• Tehran University Trade Unions Council secretary Mahan Gachpazan Eidgahi
• Law student Majid Imamverdi
• Azeri activists Mohammad Jolani, Asgar Akbarzadeh and Saeed Sadeghifar
• Sanandaj-based painter Rozhan Ghaderi
• Piranshahr-based environmentalist Abdolrahman Mohammadi Arshad
• Marivan-based English language student Khabat Veisi
• Political activists Zahra and Hoda Tahidi
• Journalist Alireza Khoshbakht
• Journalist Rouhollah Nakhaei
• Writer and sociologist Mansoureh Mousavi
• Democratic Front of Iran secretary Heshmatollah Tabarzadi
• Allameh University student Mehrdad Arandan
• Political activist Fatemeh Sepehri

The list is very far from complete and is likely to remain so because many ordinary detainees’ families will not want to name them publicly, for fear of further reprisal. At the same time, Iran Human Rights has announced that its total count of people confirmed killed by security forces stands at 36.