Iranian MP flays Guards’ treatment of ecologists

tehran — A reformist lawmaker in Iran criticised the Revolutionary Guards on Saturday for holding a group of environmentalists without access to lawyers or their families.

Outspoken member of parliament Mahmoud Sadeghi wrote an open letter to the head of the Revolutionary Guards’ intelligence wing, Hossein Taeb, published on his Telegram channel. He accused the Guards of frequently breaching the “religious and legal rights of defendants during various stages of detention and interrogation.”

Sadeghi referred particularly to the recent crackdown on environmentalists, which has included the arrest of seven members of the Persian Wildlife Heritage Organisation in January. Their treatment “clearly violates the legal rights of the defendants who, three months into their detention, are deprived of access to lawyers or meeting up with their families,” he wrote. The head of the NGO, Kavous Seyed Emami, died in

Guards are frequently breaching the religious and legal rights of defendants during various stages of detention and interrogation Mahmoud Sadeghi, a lawmaker

custody two weeks after the arrests. He also criticised the treatment of Kaveh Madani, the deputy head of the government’s environment agency who was forced to resign and leave the country under pressure from the intelligence services.

“Since my return to Iran, in the absence of any judicial permission, not only have my personal hardware and accounts been broken into, but my ‘citizen rights’ and privacy have also been violated right from the beginning,” Madani wrote in a resignation letter, published on Twitter last week. —