57 Days into Solitary Confinement, Concern Grows Over Journalist Saba Azarpeik

Fifty-seven days after her arrest and detention by security forces, the young Iranian journalist Saba Azarpeik remains in solitary confinement at Evin Prison. The journalist’s family has been told that Azarpeik’s life and safety is at risk if they give interviews, according to Azarpeik’s mother. There is no clear information available on her situation, except for some eyewitness accounts of those who saw her during court appearances recently and reported her severe weight loss and poor physical and psychological state due to spending weeks in solitary confinement and under constant interrogation.

In a short conversation with the International Campaign for Human Rights in Iran, Saba Azarpeik’s lawyer, Mahmoud Alizadeh Tabatabaei, said that he has no information about his client and that he would be pursuing her case next week. Saba Azarpeik’s mother, Akram Mohammadi, has been posting updates on her daughter on her Facebook page, “Saba’s Mother”.

“I was threatened not to give interviews. I was threatened not to write anything on Facebook, because my beloved child’s situation would be jeopardized. Really, you know very well how to threaten a mother through her child. Believe me, up till now, I have never experienced such moral values in my life, to take a child as hostage and to threaten the mother with her child’s life,” wrote Akram Mohammadi on her Facebook page on June 20, 2014.

In a July 14 interview with ILNA, Mahmoud Alizadeh had expressed hope that his client would be released on bail by week’s end. However, Azarpeik was instead transferred from Evin Prison to Branch 26 of Tehran Revolutionary Court, unbeknownst to her lawyer and in total silence, on July 21 and 22.

“I was not informed. Later, when I heard about this, I followed through and realized that Saba had been taken to court for her previous case, related to her 2013 arrest. I didn’t represent her in her previous case,” Mahmoud Alizadeh told the Campaign, adding that he has no information about her client or her court proceedings.

Saba Azarpeik was among a large group of Iranian journalists who were arrested en masse in late January 2013, all of whom were released by early March 2014. None of the journalists in that group have so far been called to court to be informed of their charges. At the time of the arrests in 2013, one of the charges mentioned for the journalists was “contact with foreign media such as BBC Persian.”

On July 12, 2014, BBC Persian quoted one of Azarpeik’s family members to say that the journalist had undergone treatment due to severe back problems.

Saba Azarpeik covered reports from the Iranian Parliament for Etemad Newspaper and the Tejarat-e Farda Weekly. Security agents arrested her at the offices of Tejarat-e Farda Weekly on the morning of Wednesday, May 28, 2014 without informing her of her charges. An outspoken journalist, Azarpeik was also active on Facebook. She was instrumental in starting a parliamentary investigation into the murder case of imprisoned blogger Sattar Beheshti, who died while in custody of the Iranian Cyber Police in November 2012, and she also covered the story of the raid on Beheshti’s memorial services by security and police forces.

In a statement released on June 10, 2014, 147 Iranian journalists objected to Saba Azarpeik’s arrest and demanded immediate clarification of her status. The journalists stated that Azarpeik’s arrest violated the Iranian Constitution and the country’s Iaws. The signatories called the information blackout about the conditions of this journalist and her family’s lack of information about her whereabouts and conditions “illegal and dangerous.”