PHOTO: Iran’s morality police confront a women over “improper” dress


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Tehran’s police chief has rejected President Rouhani’s criticism of an expansion of the “morality police” enforcing codes such as proper clothing for women and social behavior.

On Wednesday, Rouhani — who has regularly criticized the policing of behavior as taking “people to heaven through force and a whip” — challenged the Tehran police force’s plan for 7,000 undercover agents to alert officers to crimes such as “noise pollution, harassment of women, improper veiling, and reckless driving”.

See Iran Daily, April 21: Rouhani Criticizes Expansion of “Morality Police”

But Tehran chief Hossein Sajedinia said on Thursday that public morality initiatives have been in place “for years”. He insisted that the “invisibility of this recent societal security initiative was the will of the people”.

Sajedinia said the police had coordinated with the judiciary over the initiative and justified the agents by citing th eneed to deal with Iran’s extensive drug problem.

He said the agents would only carry out reporting and would not have “face-to-face contact” with the people whom they were watching.


University of Texas to Rally for Imprisoned Physicist Kokabee

Faculty and students at the University of Texas are holding a rally for Omid Kokabee, a physicist who has been held in Tehran’s Evin Prison for more than five years.

Kokabee, a Ph.D. student at the university, was detained in January 2011 as he returned to Iran to see relatives.
He was given a 10-year sentence for “communicating with a hostile government” and “illegitimate/illegal earnings”; however, his “crime”, according to family and friends, was refusing to work on military research for the Islamic Republic.

Kokabee has suffered from ill health, with an “informed source” saying that an operation on Wednesday removed a cancerous kidney. Authorities had denied him treatment for a long-term kidney ailment, according to his family.

The rally will be held on the Texas campus next week. The hashtag #FreeOmid is being used on social media to draw attention to Kokabee’s condition.

The American Physical Society awarded its 2014 Andrei Sakharov Prize to Kokabee “for his courage in refusing to use his physics knowledge to work on projects that he deemed harmful to humanity”. More than 30 Nobel Physics laureates and the Committee of Concerned Scientists have published open letters appealing for his unconditional release.


Iran Blasts “Theft” of $2 Billion in Assets by US Supreme Court Ruling

The Iranian Foreign Ministry has said that a US Supreme Court decision, ruling that Iran’s central bank must pay almost $2 billion to US victims of terrorist attacks, is theft.

Spokesman Hossein Jaberi Ansari said Wednesday’s verdict is a mockery of international law and “amounts to appropriation of the Islamic Republic of Iran’s property”.

In 2012, the US Congress enacted a law to make it easier for families of Americans killed in terrorist attacks — such as the 1983 truck bombing of a Marine Corps barracks in Beirut, Lebanon — to recover damages from Iran.

The Court ruled 6 to 2 that Congress did not exceed its constitutional role in enacting the law.

The decision comes amid rising tension between Iran and the US over sanctions and the implementation of the July 2015 nuclear deal. The Supreme Leader has led allegations that Washington is undermining the agreement by withholding Iran’s assets and maintaining restrictions on banking and financial sectors.

Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif, in New York this week, called on Washington to removes its obstacles hindering Iranian access to the global financial market. He raised the matter with US Secretary of State John Kerry in a three-hour meeting on Tuesday, and the two men are scheduled to resume the discussion on Friday.

Zarif said on Thursday:

We do not recognize the court’s ruling and the US government knows this well. The US knows this well too that whatever action it takes with respect to Iran’s assets will make it accountable in the future and it should return these assets to Iran.