Iran arrests leading human rights lawyer

ONE of Iran’s most prominent human rights lawyers has been arrested after criticising the country’s judiciary, according to her family.

Nasrin Sotoudeh, 55, has been a well-known defender of Iranian dissidents, including some of the young women arrested recently for refusing to wear the hijab face veil.

Reza Khandan, her husband, said in a Facebook post yesterday that police arrested her at home and took her to Tehran’s Evin prison. “Of all the functions that governments of the world are expected to do, the Iranian one is only good in arresting and imprisoning innocent people,” he wrote.

No official charges were announced but the arrest came shortly after Mrs Sotoudeh spoke out against efforts by Iran’s judiciary to force its own candidates on to the board of the Iranian Bar Association.

Mrs Sotoudeh said the move would make it even more difficult for Iranian lawyers to defend dissidents.

“This action will erode the halfbaked defence rights of those who have been accused of political and security offences and means a final farewell to the profession of independent attorney in Iran,” she said in an interview with the International Campaign for Human Rights in Iran.

Mrs Sotoudeh was previously arrested in 2010 and accused of spreading propaganda and endangering national security. Western governments protested her detention and she went on several hunger strikes in prison.

She was eventually released in 2013, shortly before Hassan Rouhani, Iran’s president, was due to speak at the UN.

Mrs Sotoudeh came to prominence representing defendants sentenced to die for crimes committed when they were children, as well as opposition politicians and Shirin Ebadi, the Nobel Prize-winning Iranian dissident.