Fariba Pajouh has been arrested on a number of occasions, most recently in July 2013. While in prison, she has repeatedly been denied access to her lawyer and not been allowed to contact her family.
Name: Fariba Pajouh
Career: Journalist; worked with the Iranian Labor News Agency (ILNA), the newspaper Etemad-e Melli and others.
Charges: Spying and propaganda against the regime
On July 10, 2013 four agents arrested Fariba Pajouh at her home. The agents—three men and a woman—searched her house, confiscated many of her personal belongings and took her to Cell Block 209 at Evin Prison.
Pajouh had been arrested on two previous occasions, and each time, authorities refused to inform her of the charges against her. During previous arrests—in 2008 and 2009—she was also denied access to her lawyer and visits from family members, but in 2013, she was allowed to telephone her mother, though the charges against her were not specified.
Hardliner websites reported that Pajouh had been arrested on drug possession charges. In an attempt to counter these rumors, Pajouh’s mother told the website Jaras (The Green Way Movement) that the public was aware that these kinds of blogs pushed particular agendas and that the stories about her daughter were “so baseless that no attention should be paid to them.” “First of all”, she said, “Fariba is a well known journalist. Secondly, they do not put somebody arrested on drug charges in security ward 209. Drug offenders have a separate prosecutor. I only ask God to give some wisdom to the people who spread such rumors.”
“Maybe the charge against her was that she was happy about the election results,” her father told another website, referring to the 2013 election that brought reformist candidate Hassan Rouhani to the presidency—a result that angered hardline politicians in Iran. “It is not clear what she has been charged with,” he said. “She told us on the phone that prison conditions are very different from four years ago. She said, ‘don’t worry. I am not the same person I was four years ago’.”
Pajouh was released on July 26, 2013.
Pajouh had previously been arrested in the aftermath of the 2009 disputed presidential election, and before that, in 2008, when she was due to accompany a foreign journalist to the United States as a translator to cover the US presidential election. Over the course of her first arrest, she was accused of espionage, a charge that was re-instated on subsequent arrests. Hardliner media claimed that she had worked for the Persian service of France’s Radio Internationale and had cooperated with the French intelligence services.
Pajouh was arrested for a second time on August 22, 2009 at her home and taken to Evin Prison. She spent a month in a dark and narrow solitary cell known among inmates as “the grave”.
After two months of being incarcerated, Pajouh was finally informed of the charges against her—espionage and propaganda against the regime. For more than four months, she was denied contact with her family or her lawyer. “Fariba was angry about how the guards had treated her,” says her father, Reza Pajouh. ”Once during our visit she was so hysterical that she screamed. She was upset with the repulsive body search that she had been put through.”
After solitary confinement, Pajouh was transferred to the common ward, where she shared a cell with journalist Hengameh Shahidi. Both went on a hunger strike to protest the inhumane conditions of their detention. They did not eat for five days, and both had to be hospitalized after collapsing.
Shahidi was released first, and, on December 23, Pajouh was released on bail. She had spent 124 days in jail. Her father was forced to use his house as collateral. The Revolutionary Court sentenced her to one year in prison, which was later suspended for five years by the appellate court.
After her release from prison in 2009, Pajouh suffered from depression and received medical attention for heart problems, likely to be the result of stress.
Four years on, prison conditions had improved, but one thing hadn’t changed: the charges against Fariba Pajouh were anythiing but transparent.
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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