Marzieh Rasouli began serving a two-year prison sentence on July 8, 2014. The journalist, who has worked for Shargh and Etemad newspapers, was charged with collaborating with foreign media and propaganda against the regime.
Name: Marzieh Rasouli
Born: 1980
Career: Journalist; has worked for Shargh and Etemad newspapers
Charges: Propaganda against the regime, spying, and disturbing public order by participating in illegal gatherings.
Marzieh Rasouli was arrested on January 17, 2012 at her home. She was charged with spying and working for the BBC Persian service.
She was detained at Evin Prison’s 2A cell block, which is directly controlled by the Revolutionary Guards. Soon after her arrest, state-run news agency Mehr News reported that “members of a network of journalists who had cooperated with BBC Persian” had been arrested, of which Rasouli was said to be one. She was tortured and forced to confess on television.
The Revolutionary Guards accused Rasouli and her fellow detainees of colluding with the BBC, but also with “Western intelligence agencies and groups outside the country who oppose the Islamic Republic,” according to legal rights group the Defenders of Human Rights Center. The Iranian Center for Pursuing Organized Crime declared that the arrests were made in connection with an operation called “Fox-Eyed,” allegedly established to root out BBC Persian operatives in Iran. BBC Persian has repeatedly denied that it works with anybody based inside Iran.
Marzieh Rasouli and colleagues were also accused of taking part in a secret operation to recruit members of Iran’s elite political and media circles to cooperate with the British Intelligence Service (MI6).
While the investigation was ongoing, no information was made available about the conditions in which Rasouli was being kept or the charges against her. When questioned, the spokesman for the Islamic Judiciary replied that it was “legally impossible” to make the charges public, adding that the prosecutor for Tehran “will declare them if the necessity arises.”
Revolutionary Guards kept her in solitary confinement for almost 40 days. Her family’s efforts to find out the reasons for her arrest proved fruitless, and her father, Abolfazl Rasouli, told the media he had been given false promises about the release of his daughter. “My wife has a heart condition and has yet to be told of my daughter’s arrest,” he said. “We have told her that that she is on a business trip and will be back soon. But she is restless because days have gone by and she has not heard from her.”
Rasouli was released after her family paid a bail of more than $110,000 on February 27, 2012. The court sentenced her to two years in prison plus 50 lashes. Her sentence began on July 8 2014; she remains in prison.
Rasouli has a huge amount of support from within Iran and among the international human rights and journalism communities, who have all campaigned for her release. Less than a week after her imprisonment, U.S. philosopher and linguist Noam Chomsky called on President Rouhani’s administration to act quickly on her case, and to free Rasouli and her colleagues. "I was surprised and distressed to learn of the detention and harsh treatment of Marzieh Rasouli and other women journalists in Iran," Chomsky told the British newspaper the Guardian. “Such actions are entirely unacceptable.”
This is part of IranWire’s series Crime: Journalism, a portfolio on the legal and political persecution of Iranian journalists and bloggers, published in both Persian and English.
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