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Two Iranian lawyers and a civil rights activist were among a group organizing a legal challenge to Irans top leader and the government over their disastrous handling of the pandemic.

But before they could even file their complaint, they were seized and incarcerated.

Now known on Iranian social media as the health defenders, their case has attracted widespread attention, even though their trial in Tehran is not open to the public.

We were still discussing the complaint and what to do when 15 intelligence agents from the judiciary violently broke into the office and arrested us, the civil rights activist, Mehdi Mahmoudian, said in a phone interview from Tehrans high-security Evin prison, where he is being held along with his co-defendants, lawyers Mostafa Nili and Arash Kaykhosravi.

We were held in solitary confinement with no access to lawyers, telephones or family visits for nearly a month in an illegal detention wing of Evin that belongs to the judiciary, he added. Mr. Mahmoudian said he and others had received phone calls from intelligence agents beforehand asking them to cancel the meeting, a tipoff that they were under surveillance.

Mr. Mahmoudian was among a group of nine Iranian lawyers and civil rights activists who had gathered in a Tehran office one afternoon in August to discuss a draft of a lawsuit they planned to file against the countrys top officials. He said they had been planning to sue Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and the government on charges of mismanaging the pandemic and hampering the vaccine rollout with a politically motivated ban by Mr. Khamenei on importing vaccines made in the United States and Britain.

Hadi Ghaemi, the director of the independent Center for Human Rights in Iran, an advocacy group based in New York, said the planned lawsuit was one example of a movement taking shape across Iran to demand accountability from public officials and justice for a range of offenses, from the killing of protesters, the torture of political prisoners and the deaths attributable to delays in delivering Covid vaccines.

These lawyers were really the voice of a society that was outraged at the Covid situation and they wanted to put this on the map by filing this lawsuit, he said.

From the onset of the pandemic, Iran has treated independent releases of information about it as a crime and a matter of national security. In the early months, for example, authorities banned health care workers and doctors from discussing the real number of hospitalizations and deaths.

Health Ministry officials involved with pandemic policies have said publicly that they were interrogated regularly by intelligence agents.

Iran had already been ravaged by the coronavirus by the time of the meeting in August, and the country was in the midst of yet another intense wave of outbreaks and deaths. The group of lawyers and activists debated whether to name the supreme leader in their lawsuit, according to Mr. Mahmoudian.

Some of those present favored the idea because Ayatollah Khamenei had issued the vaccine ban, delaying Irans mass inoculation by months. But others opposed it, arguing it would make the case too sensitive.

Mr. Mahmoudian and the two lawyers have been detained for the past four months in Tehrans notorious Evin prison, the central site in the country for holding and torturing political prisoners. Branches of the intelligence service, from the judiciary to the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps., control their own wings at Evin, where the prisoners are kept in solitary confinement. He managed to evade prison restrictions and speak to a reporter by phone a week ago.

The three are charged with spreading propaganda against the state and disruption of public order in a trial that began in late October in Tehrans Revolutionary Court a special court for political cases and political prisoners. They are also charged with forming and belonging to an enemy organization a reference to a human rights group they established called Citizens Rights Protection Association. If convicted, they could each face up to 10 years in prison.

A statement last week by a group of international rights organizations, including Human Rights Watch and PEN America, called for their immediate release and asked the United Nations to raise their case with Irans government.

They are completely innocent, said Saeed Dehghan, an Iranian human rights lawyer, who knows the detainees and has worked with them on other cases.

Irans U.N. mission did not respond to questions about the three prisoners.

During the raid, the intelligence agents demanded that all nine people present seven lawyers and two activists sign a statement pledging to drop the lawsuit. Some agreed and were allowed to leave.

Five were arrested but two were released on bail.

Mr. Mahmoudian is currently serving a four-year prison sentence in connection with a previous charge that was suspended until his arrest in August: He had asked the public to light a candle in memory of the Ukrainian Airlines jet downed by the Revolutionary Guards in January 2020. Iran said the missile fire that had destroyed the plane, killing 176 people, was a mistake.

In the months since the raid, Iran has progressed in its vaccination campaign. As of this week, Iran reports that 50 million of its 85 million people have received two doses of vaccine, according to state media.

After the current government took office in August and conservatives consolidated power, vaccine imports, availability and mass inoculation improved considerably.

But with the Omicron variant spreading rapidly across the world, Iranian health officials are encouraging the public to get booster shots to increase their defenses against the new strain. And in this sense, Iran may once again find itself behind the curve: Only about 2 million people have received a booster shot so far, according to the health ministry.

Many in Iran have questioned whether top officials deliberately held off on importing vaccines during the tenure of former President Hassan Rouhani because of political infighting between his more centrist government and the conservative camp within the ruling system, which is aligned with Mr. Khamenei, the highest authority in the land.

Vaccines began flowing once conservative President Ebrahim Raisi, a close ally of the supreme leader, took power in August, making him appear as a more efficient administrator.

For its part, the government has blamed the delays in vaccine imports and other pandemic-related problems on sanctions and it has lobbied to get the billions of dollars in oil revenues that have been frozen under the U.S. sanctions released to pay for vaccines through the Covax initiative.

But crackdowns on civil liberties under Mr. Raisi, who has a dire record of human rights violations, have intensified, rights groups and lawyers say. The government is facing almost weekly protests around the country over a range of grievances, from farmers angry over water resource mismanagement to a teachers union striking over wages. It has responded with an iron fist.

The trial of the health defenders trio has hit a nerve with many activists, ordinary Iranians and even international organizations who are asking: If lawyers cant seek justice in the Islamic Republic within the framework of the constitution, then who can?

In November, more than 500 human rights defenders and activists signed a petition demanding the release of the three jailed men and said their ongoing detention violated fair trial guarantees under Irans constitution.

In October, the three men arrested in August published an open letter from prison declaring their intention to sue Mr. Khamenei and the former president, Mr. Rouhani as well as the former health minister and members of the countrys coronavirus task force.

We created our organization with the intent that if a persons rights are being violated, we could step in and react, Mr. Mahmoudian said. But right now, they are not allowing any of us to even defend ourselves in court.

See the article here:
Health Defenders Jailed in Iran Wanted to Sue Supreme Leader Over Covid - The New York Times

Brace yourself for 2022, a year of living dangerously.

Many of the world's most profound gains of the post-World War II era will be tested. The security of Europe and Asia, the resilience of democratic governance, the advance of open markets, the sanctity of individual rights and the certainty of human progress all are in the balance.

Never in the 30 years since the Cold War's end has a U.S. president entered a new year confronting such an explosive brew of geopolitical and domestic political uncertainty. They are intertwined like a Gordian knot that only bold action can untangle.

The convergence of these external and internal perils, amid deep U.S. political divisiveness and international diffidence, raises the difficulty level for any effective response.

Then layer onto all that the most disturbing rise of inflation in three decades and the persistent torment of Covid-19. Add to that the certainty that all these issues will drive an even greater wedge between rich and poor countries and peoples, and increased global volatility seems inevitable.

All that said, these are the three external factors that should concern us most immediately in 2022:

A revanchist Russia is bent on regaining control of Ukraine; China, similarly, is escalating its threats to Taiwan's independence (don't fool yourself that Ukrainian and Taiwanese freedoms can be separated); and Iran is so rapidly moving toward nuclear-weapons breakout capability that Israel may be forced to respond.

These dangers are escalating at a time when Chinese, Russian and Iranian leaders alike having witnessed the Biden administration's withdrawal from Afghanistan and its understandable focus on domestic issues may see 2022 as the best moment yet to advance their geopolitical ambitions.

The optimists among us can take some comfort in the fact that there is a possible path through this briar patch. Advances in technology, health care, and wider human access to knowledge may very well usher in a new epoch of global progress.

There's also more than enough evidence that democracies, particularly the United States, have sufficient resilience to rebound and regroup.

History also has shown that the most authoritarian forms of government prove ultimately to be the most fragile.

China's remarkable rise as the world's first capitalist-communist experiment is running up against a series of setbacks, mostly self-inflicted.

President Xi Jinping is doubling down on domestic repression and reinforcing Communist Party control over China's most successful companies, particularly in the technology space. In so doing, he is choking them off from international financial markets and he may be killing the panda that laid China's economic miracle.

Vladimir Putin's Russia seems to be a country on the march, pumped up by spiking energy prices and geopolitical muscle-flexing from Syria to the Donbas.However, the weight of existing and new economic sanctions, Russia's demographic challenges, and an economy entirely reliant on energy will hamstring Putin's aspirations to undo the humiliations of his lifetime.

In a documentary that aired on Russian television last Sunday, Putin said the fall of the Soviet Union three decades ago remained a tragedy for most of his fellow citizens. He talked for the first time publicly about how he had to work driving a taxi during that period to make ends meet.

"After all, what is the collapse of the Soviet Union?" he asked. "This is the collapse of historical Russia under the name of the Soviet Union."

Regarding Iran, how much longer can the regime endure -such rampant corruption? The republic has produced so few goods for its people, while engaging in countless, expensive adventures abroad in Iraq, Yemen, Syria, Lebanon and elsewhere in the Middle East.

Yet perhaps this all points to the greatest danger of 2022: the swirl of uncertainties around the United States. Adversaries and allies alike question our internal cohesiveness and our external capability and willingness to act.

The glue that has held the global system together during most of the period after WWII, the United States, looks unstuck to many in the world. America doesn't want China or anyone else to replace its traditional global leadership role, and it's not retiring from the scene. But it's struggling to find updated and effective means to shape world affairs.

To be fair, the Biden administration and its remarkably accomplished foreign relations team diagnosed each of these challenges early and brilliantly.

Indeed, in this space a year ago, I wrote, "Joe Biden has that rarest of opportunities that history provides: the chance to be a transformative foreign policy president."

In March, Biden himself declared, "Our world is at an inflection point. Global dynamics have shifted. New crises demand our attention. One thing is certain: we will only succeed in advancing American interests and upholding our universal values by working in common cause with our closest allies and partners, and by renewing our own enduring sources of national strength."

It's never easy to turn rhetoric into execution, but that is what 2022 needs to be about. A president's first year in office is always messy, and this one has been particularly so.

The true test of Biden's second year will be less over whether his administration understands the historic nature of the challenges (it does) and more about whether it can organize itself domestically and internationally to manage 2022's geopolitical challenges.

Worse than questioning our values, our partners and allies are worried about our capability and competence to act.

This year of living dangerously will get off to a brisk start with the Winter Olympics in Beijing and more Russian troop movements near Ukraine. It will wrap up with a Chinese Communist Party Congress likely to make Xi leader for life and U.S. midterm elections.

In this year of living dangerously, however, it may be the U.S., more than any other actor, whose actions and inactions will drive the plot.

Frederick Kempeis the President and Chief Executive Officer of the Atlantic Council.

Originally posted here:
Op-ed: Welcome to 2022, the year of living dangerously with China, Russia and Iran but the U.S. will drive the plot - CNBC

The debate over what kind of capability to give to Israel and how quickly is an old one in Washington. In 2008, President George W. Bush deflected requests from Prime Minister Ehud Olmert for specialized bunker-busting bombs and the B-2 bomber, and to rent about 10 flying tankers, which Mr. Olmert said would be needed in any Israeli attack on Irans main nuclear complex at Natanz. Part of the operation would have involved borrowing U.S. refueling capabilities.

Vice President Dick Cheney argued at the time that the United States should give Israel exactly what it sought, but he lost the argument, Bush administration officials later said. Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney allude to the episode in their memoirs, but they do not mention that they told the Israelis that they were authorizing covert action intended to sabotage Irans effort with a new generation of cyberweapons.

That program, code-named Olympic Games, ultimately became the joint Israeli-American effort that produced the Stuxnet worm and ultimately destroyed more than a thousand Iranian centrifuges.

Israel later developed other capabilities and trained for them. On several occasions during the Obama administration, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel was on the brink of ordering a strike, according to Israeli officials and a Times interview with Mr. Netanyahu in 2019. But the prime minister backed off at the last minute, in large part because of fear of an irreparable breach with Washington.

But in 2017, when the Israeli air force determined that it needed to replacing its refueling planes, Mr. Netanyahus government did not immediately place an order. Irans nuclear program seemed under control largely because it had shipped 97 percent of its nuclear fuel out of the country under the 2015 agreement that Mr. Netanyahu had vociferously opposed. Training for strikes against Iran slowed.

They have been revived. Israeli planners, according to several current and former officials, believe that if they do conduct an attack, it will take many repeated bombings of some of the facilities especially Fordow, a fuel enrichment center buried deep in a mountain on an Iranian military base. But time will be short, they contend, and so they would have to refuel quickly.

U.S. officials say that they do not believe an attack is imminent and that they think Mr. Bennett, in so publicly preparing for military action, may be seeking far tougher terms in an ultimate deal between Iran and the West.

David E. Sanger and Helene Cooper reported from Washington, and Ronen Bergman from Tel Aviv. Eric Schmitt contributed reporting.

Read this article:
Israel Finds Planes That Could Be Key to a Strike on Iran Badly Back-Ordered - The New York Times

Iran is negotiating with Chinese and Turkish companies for building affordable government housing in a possible oil barter deal oil, an official said on Saturday.

Irans President Ebrahim Raisi (Raeesi) has promised to build one million apartment every year, during his four-year term to solve rising housing costs for ordinary Iranians squeezed by high inflation and a worsening economic crisis.

Ahmad Donyamali, a member of the state housing council told the Iranian Labour News Agency (ILNA) that the government is in talks with Chinese, Turkish and even a European company for contracting out part of the construction job and pay for it in oil.

News about Chinese companies participating in the construction project emerged in October but it was swiftly denied at the time.

Tehran faces two impediments in contracting with foreign firms. The first hurdle is to pay for goods and services amid a US banking sanction that threatens foreign banks with third-party sanctions if they deal with Iran. The second problem is lack of foreign currency.

US oil sanctions have substantially reduced Irans dollar earnings since 2018, forcing the country to dip into its foreign currency reserves, which observers say declines substantially in three years, although they might have marginally recovered this year.

An oil barter deal might specially work for Chinese companies that already import Iranian oil under the radar of US sanctions.

However, the promise to build 4 million apartments in 4 years amid an economic crisis might be more of a wish than a reasonable project for Iran.

Nuclear talks with the United States that could help lift sanctions are stalled at the moment and the outlook for Irans economy is bleak. The national currency that has declined tenfold in four years might dip to unprecedented lows if sanctions continue for another year.

The US has threatened to tighten the application of sanctions. Diplomats visited the United Arab Emirates this week to pursue the issue of actors in the region abiding by the US sanctions.

Donyamali, without naming any companies, said that negotiations have proven foreign firms are offering much better prices than their Iranian counterparts. A price of $100 per square meter ($9 per sqf) has been offered for building cheap, prefab apartment buildings. This means more than a $24 billion investment for 4 million apartments, money that Iran does not have now. He emphasized that Irans position is not pay any cash to foreign companies and is basing the talks on the principle of oil barter.

Iranian companies are asking almost double of what foreign firms are ready to accept, Donyamali said. Most Iranian companies in such a large project would be state or quasi-sate entities, some possibly linked with the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, IRGC.

See original here:
Iran Wants To Barter Oil With Foreign Firms To Build Housing - Iran International

An Iranian human rights group says rights defenders in Iran in 2021 received a total of 479 years in prison and were subjected to a host of inhumane treatments.

Human Rights in Iran, based in New York, in a report issued on December 16, titled 100 Iran Human Rights Defenders 2021, has provided updates on the status of 100 human and civil rights defenders who are either in prison, released on bail or were subjected to harassment by authorities. Those who were convicted this year received a total of 479 years in prison and 907 lashes.

In every case, the accused were tried without due process of law, being either denied a lawyer or forced to accept government-approved attorneys, without full access to case material.

Iran Human Rights Director, Mahmood Amiry-Moghaddam said: The world must not be a silent witness to the high price Iranian human rights defenders are paying for fundamental rights.

Human rights defenders, activists and families of victims who received sentences or were subjected to harassment and intimidation doubled in 2021, the report says. The 100 people profiled in the report are lawyers, journalists, teachers, womens, workers and civil rights activists, environmentalists, minorities and whistleblowers.

Continued here:
Rights Defenders In Iran Received A Total Of 479 Years In Jail In 2021 - Iran International