Entire Baha’i Leadership in Iran Detained Without Charge

Health and Safety May Be At Risk

(16 May 2008) The International Campaign for Human Rights in Iran is calling on Iranian judicial authorities to account, in terms of Iranian and international law, for the detention on 14 May 2008 of six leading members of the Baha’i Faith, who have been taken to Evin prison. All are members of the Baha’i national coordination group, the “Friends;” the seventh member has been imprisoned in Mashhad since 5 March 2008. No charges have been announced in the cases.While the detainees have all been regularly summoned, detained, and interrogated as individuals, this is the first time they have been seized as a group. The entire leadership body of the Baha’is in Iran is thus in detention.

“We are deeply concerned that the detention without charge of the entire Baha’i leadership is consistent with a pattern of violent and illegal persecution of Baha’is in Iran,” the Campaign stated. “The persecution of religious minorities will bring neither internal stability nor international security to Iran.”

Intelligence agents detained Fariba Kamalabadi, Jamaloddin Khanjani, Afif Naeimi, Saeid Rezaie, Behrouz Tavakkoli, and Vahid Tizfahm at their respective homes in the early morning of 14 May and conducted searches.

The seventh member of the leadership body, Mahvash Sabet, has been in incommunicado detention since 5 March. According to information received by the Campaign, her family has only been allowed to see her for a moment when Intelligence Ministry agents brought her to a public place where a family member was able to recognize her. Other than this brief encounter, her family has had no contact with her, nor any telephone calls.

“There is cause to fear for the health and safety of Mahvash Sabet, whose incommunicado detention amounts to a form of torture, and of her colleagues as well,” the Campaign said.

Such arrests are alarming, especially when taking into account the past treatment of Baha’is and recent trends. In 1980s, the Iranian government targeted the Baha’i leadership through extensive arrests and executed seventeen members of the leadership. In the past three years the numbers of executions of all kinds have skyrocketed in Iran, doubling each year.

The Campaign is calling upon members of the international community, the United Nations, and the European Union to protest these unjustified detentions, and to call for the immediate release of the detained Baha’i members if they are not properly charged in accordance with international standards.