A number of former Iranian female prisoners revealed that they were subjected to “immoral” practices while being held in notorious prisons, including being strip searched in front of cameras.
They also spoke of being made to remove pads or tampons when they were on their period and told to squat or do jumping jacks while squatting.
Among the prisoners who were subjected to such acts, Moghgan Keshavarz, who spent about three years in the notorious Evin and Qarchak prisons in Tehran.
Keshavarz stated in an interview with the British “BBC” network that she was subjected to three searches while she was naked in front of the surveillance cameras inside the prison.
She adds that the third time, a prison guard took pictures of her naked, and when she protested, the guard told her that this was necessary so that any allegations of torture would be confronted in the future.
“Who will see these videos and photos? Will the regime use them later to silence us?” Keshavarz asked, noting that she may be at risk of blackmail even after the end of her sentence.
Keshavarz, who fled the country, is one of the prominent Iranian activists in the field of women’s rights, as many photos of her can be seen on her Instagram account without a headscarf in several public places in Iran.
Keshavarz was arrested and charged with “conspiracy against national security, disrespect for Islam, propaganda against the regime, and promotion of corruption and obscenity” and was sentenced to 12 years and seven months in prison.
Recently, she was sentenced for “corruption on earth,” a crime punishable by death in Iran.
Other prisoners confirm that searches of detainees after stripping them of their clothes are usually common in drug-related cases, but prisoners of conscience have never been subjected to such acts, and certainly not in front of cameras.
In early June, the Iranian judiciary denied allegations that female prisoners were filmed naked, describing it as “Western propaganda against Iran.”
However, the head of the Judicial Committee in the Iranian Parliament said in mid-June that “the female guards are the only ones who watch the video clips of the prisoners,” admitting that the prisoners are already being filmed.
The BBC says that it obtained secret documents from a hacking group called “Adalah Ali” dated November 2021, which included a letter from the Iranian judiciary acknowledging that a female prisoner was stripped during an inspection.
The letter identifies the imprisoned victim as Megan Kavusi, a Kurdish human rights activist, while she is being held in a prison in Karaj.
The network quoted a source familiar with the case from inside Iran as saying that Kavoussi was strip-searched five times.
Commenting on this information, Iranian human rights activist Mona Silawi says that the Iranian regime aims, through such practices, to “humiliate Iranian women, break their dignity and blackmail them in the future.”
Al-Silawi adds to Al-Hurra that the Iranian authorities also aim to intimidate the families of Iranian women and girls who participate in an activity or protest against the regime, and to deliver a message to them that this is their fate if they go to prison.
Silawi asserts that this is not the time that women have been targeted by the regime of men who, since the first days following the fall of the Shah’s regime, there have been executions and rape of Iranian teenage girls.
Silawi points out that the judiciary in Iran is complicit in the repression and abuses taking place in Iranian prisons.
Although these actions could negatively affect the course of the protests in Iran, Silawi believes that this effect is “temporary, and will not reduce the momentum of popular opposition to the regime as a result of the remaining main reasons for the outbreak of protests represented by the economic crisis and the interference of religious authority in people’s lives.”
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2023-07-21 19:02:11
