On Christmas Eve, two female scientists began a hunger strike at the notorious Evin prison in Tehran. Dr. Kylie Moore-Gilbert, a British Australian expert on Shia Islam from the University of Melbourne, and Dr. Fariba Adelkhah, a French Iranian anthropologist working at the Paris Institute of Political Studies, were arrested during research visits to Iran and were accused of espionage by the intelligence service of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps.
Moore-Gilbert, who is in her early 30s, extensively wrote on the pro-democracy movement in Bahrain. She was detained at Tehran airport in October 2018 while boarding a flight back to Melbourne after making an invited presentation at the university conference. She was sentenced to 10 years in prison in a closed trial that shocked Australia. Since her arrest, she has been kept in solitary confinement in a 65-square-foot cell.
Fariba Adelkhah, 60, who wrote about contemporary Iran and translated French poetry into Farsi, was arrested by the Revolutionary Guard in June 2019 on charges of “espionage,” “spreading propaganda against [the] political system,” and “conspiracy against national security.” After strong protests from the French government, the espionage charge was dropped, but the other two charges remain.
In November 2019, after a lengthy trial, an Iranian court sentenced biologist Niloufar Bayani, 31, a graduate of Columbia University and program manager of the Persian Wildlife Heritage Foundation, to 10 years in prison for sowing “corruption on Earth.” She was arrested together with other Iranian conservationists falsely accused of collecting military information under the cover of environmental research. During the trial, Bayani complained that the Revolutionary Guard threatened to pull her fingernails out if she would not sign a confession.
In a letter sneaked from Evin prison, Iranian physicist Narges Mohammadi, 47, described how in late December 2019, several male guards supervised by an intelligence officer violently dragged her through prison corridors and broken glass while she bled from the cuts. It was payback for the hunger strike that Mohammadi, together with seven other female inmates, held to commemorate the lives of hundreds of protesters killed on the streets of Iran by the Revolutionary Guard led by Gen. Qassem Soleimani.
Mohammadi, vice president of the Iranian Center for Human Rights and recipient of the Andrei Sakharov human rights award of the American Physical Society, is serving a 16-year prison term for her “membership in an illegal organization whose aim is to harm the national security,” a reference to her campaign for abolishing the death penalty in Iran. While in prison, she has been repeatedly denied medical care and visits by her family, which includes her underage children.
Defending people swallowed by the grinding machine of the Revolutionary Guard is a daunting task. Nasrin Sotoudeh is one of a handful of human rights lawyers who have put their lives and freedom on the line. She represented Shirin Ebadi, the first Muslim woman who received the Nobel Peace Prize (subsequently confiscated by Iranian authorities), as well as falsely accused politicians.
She spent 2010-13 in jail, held a 49-day hunger strike, and was released as a result of the unprecedented campaign on her behalf by the European Parliament. In 2018, she was arrested again. In March 2019, the Islamic Revolutionary Court in Tehran sentenced Nasrin Sotoudeh in absentia (she refused to attend the trial because she could not choose her own lawyer) to 38 years in prison and 148 lashes.
Yes, on top of the unprecedented 38-year prison term for legal work, the court of the country that calls itself the cradle of human civilization has ordered a tiny, 56-year-old woman, one of Iran’s most prolific legal minds, to be flogged with a stick 148 times.
This carnage led by the Revolutionary Guard must end. Iran must acknowledge that its growing number of female scholars is a precious treasure. If Iran wants to establish moral equivalency with the West, it should stop destroying the minds and lives of its brightest women by torturing them and sentencing them to decades in prison on bogus charges.
Eugene M. Chudnovsky is a Distinguished Professor at the City University of New York and Co-Chair of the Committee of Concerned Scientists.
