ERBIL, Kurdistan Region – A Kurdish woman charged with national security offences in relation to her civil society work was released on bail earlier this week after six months in Iranian detention, local and international human rights groups have reported.
Zahra Mohammadi, 29, is director of the Nojin Cultural Association, an organisation whose work includes teaching Kurdish language and literature. At the time of her May 23 arrest, the organisation had been undertaking a project in and around her native city of Sanandaj to teach Kurdish literacy to hundreds of children.
In Sanandaj, like the rest of Iran, Persian is the only language in which primary and secondary education is conducted- despite being a Kurdish-majority city.
Mohammadi was released on bail on December 2. Her release was reported by local human rights organisation Hengaw on Tuesday, and PEN International and Amnesty International confirmed her conditional release to Rudaw English on Friday.
Mohammadi is “still facing charges and an upcoming trial,” PEN International told Rudaw English upon confirmation from its Kurdish PEN center.
The 29-year-old was arrested by plain-clothes Ministry of Intelligence officers in Sanandaj in May, alongside two of her colleagues. Her phone and computer were confiscated during her arrest.
While her colleagues were released a few days later, Mohammadi was held in solitary confinement for a week. Her family was only notified of her detention when she was transferred to a prison in Sanandaj on May 31st. She told family who visited her that she had been forced to confess during her solitary confinement, Amnesty reported.
Her detention attracted the attention of international organisations, who viewed her arrest as indicative of national and international state repression of the teaching of minority languages.
PEN International, a literary organisation active in over 100 countries, released a statement condemning her detention in June.
“State authorities in Iran and elsewhere must understand…the repression of the linguistic rights of minorities is a sign of the weakness of the state concerned and an attempt to stifle freedom and basic human rights, ” Simona Škrabec, Chair of the Translation and Linguistic Rights Committee of PEN International said in the June 10 statement.
Amnesty International called for her release “immediately and unconditionally” on November 13.
Mohammadi was held in incommunicado detention (without lawyer or family access) for over two months, in which time a pre-existing health condition she had worsened. She was prohibited from following a special diet and taking medication she was prescribed before her detention.
Her family requested she be taken to hospital, but their requests were ignored, Amnesty said.
Without notifying her friends and family, Mohammadi was transferred to Sanandaj’s Revolutionary Court for trial on September 18. Her family was alerted on the day that she was in court, arriving to protest her unannounced trial.
Her court case was subsequently postponed, and has yet to take place.
As of November 13, Mohammadi had only been able to meet with her lawyers once - after four months of detention.
Mohammadi has been no stranger to scrutiny from Tehran, having been subject to lengthy interrogations from the Ministry of Intelligence before her May 23 arrest. A March 8 interrogation lasted eight hours, and was conducted without legal representation, according to Amnesty.
Since the re-imposition of US sanctions and the heightening of tensions, authorities in Iran have started tightening the noose on labor activists, journalists, satirists, environmentalists, anti-death penalty campaigners, and researchers, who have been detained in droves, with some sentenced in trials whose fairness has been questioned.
Ethnic minority groups including Kurds are disproportionally detained and more harshly sentenced for acts of political dissidence, according to a July 2019 report from the United Nations Special Rapporteur on human rights in Iran.
