“Iran’s Chief of Judiciary Ebrahim Raisie, in a letter to the Leader of the Islamic Revolution, proposed to pardon or commute the punishment of 1,849 convicts and the proposal was approved by Ayatollah Khamenei,” state media outlet IRNA reported on Sunday.
Every year on important religious and national holidays, Khamenei pardons a number of prisoners at the request of the head of the judiciary. Article 110 in Iran’s constitution grants the Supreme Leader many leadership and duty powers, as well as “pardoning or reducing the sentences of convicts, within the framework of Islamic criteria.”
Paris-based Kurdistan Human Rights Network (KHRN) on Sunday announced the release of three Kurdish political prisoners in Urmia in West Azerbaijan Province. Two of the prisoners, who were from Saqez and Mahabad and arrested in 2020 and 2021, were released on bail.
Mustafa Sabzi, a citizen of West Azerbaijan Province’s Maku, was also released, after his arrest in 2014 by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), then sentenced to 15 years in prison on charges of membership of the Kurdistan Free Life Party (PJAK), an Kurdish armed opposition group.
This comes after the New York-based Iran Human Rights group on March 24 warned that political prisoners are being “left out” from some privileges.
“With a handful of exceptions, the vast majority of those who went home for the New Year holidays were not political prisoners,” said the group, adding that they have also been “largely left out of the mass pardons that have been granted over the past year by the judiciary” due to coronavirus threats.
“In addition to rejecting a furlough request for the holidays, Iran’s judiciary also stalled an attempt by human rights attorney Saeid Dehghan to invoke a rarely-used article in the law in favor of his imprisoned client,” added the group.
Iran was accused of a “wide range of human rights violations” by dozens of human rights organizations in a letter on June 17 including detention and long-term imprisonment of activists, journalists and environmentalists.
The UN Human Rights Council on March 23 extended the mandate of the UN Special Rapporteur Javid Rahman. His mandate has been extended every year since he was appointed three years ago, due to the worrying human rights situation in Iran, despite not being allowed to visit the country for close monitoring, reports Radio France International (RFI).
Iran’s UN envoy Esmaeli Baghaei Hamaneh and Iranian foreign minister Saeed Khatibzadeh rejected the resolution, calling it an “anti-Iran resolution” and an “instrumental and political use of human rights.”
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