Journalist Naeimeh Doostdar was incarcerated at Evin Prison for her work with Radio Farda while her family were harassed and bullied into not giving evidence at her trial. Before the court released its decision, she fled Iran with her husband and newborn child.
Name: Naeimeh Doostdar
Career: Journalist, blogger, novelist and poet; human and women’s rights activist; worked with the newspaper Jam-e Jam, the Ham Shahri group of publications and Radio Farhang (Culture); author of two children’s books; winner of Iranian national awards for journalism.
Charges: Activities against national security by cooperating with foreign media and participation in illegal rallies.
In late January 2011, Naeimeh Doostdar was boarding a plane for a job interview with Radio Farda, a radio network funded by US Congress, which operates from Prague in the Czech Republic. Just minutes before the plane was due to leave, security forces boarded it, confiscated Doostdar’s passport and told her that she was prohibited from leaving Iran. Two weeks later, she was arrested.
“They arrested me on trumped-up charges and took me to the revolutionary court,” she says. After the arrest, she says, “they searched my home and humiliated members of my family. Then they took me to Evin Prison blindfolded.” The Iranian Intelligence Ministry arrested a number of other journalists at the same time as part of a coordinated operation.
“I was kept in a small, dirty solitary cell and when the prison was overcrowded, I was squeezed in with three or four other prisoners. We weren’t given the most basic of necessities that prisoners are usually entitled to. I wore the same dress the whole time and wasn’t allowed to change my clothes or wash them. The guards wanted money for sanitary towels and soap. You had to beg and wait for hours to get to the prison clinic. Instead of simple painkillers and sedatives, the doctor prescribed strong tranquilizers and mind-altering drugs. A couple of times these made me physically and mentally sick.”
“I was accused of having engaged in acts that threatened national security by being in contact with Radio Farda, and by participating in anti-government demonstrations and riots.” Doostdar also published a piece on a blog run by the British Foreign Office. “For a month I was kept in a 2×3m jail with two other detainees and interrogated several times, sometimes twice a day for five hours,” she wrote. “I wasn’t allowed to talk to my family for longer than two minutes on the phone. I was also blindfolded during interrogations and insulted, threatened and sexually assaulted by interrogators.”
“Members of my family were threatened several times. Secret agents stopped my sister in the street and told her if she gave information for my case my situation would worsen. The same thing happened to my parents – anonymous calls telling them not to give interviews.”
She was freed on bail in March 2011 and underwent several court hearings. “My case was left open and my lawyer never received any form of official notice. Nevertheless, I was forced to write and sign an official statement, which stated I would never contact or collaborate with foreign media organizations again.”
Upon her release, Doostdar was banned from going abroad for another year. “I finally got my passport back – but again this was conditional and I wasn’t allowed to talk about my case if I left the country. My husband was threatened when he collected my passport and [was] told that he shouldn’t leave the country.”
Doostdar and her husband left Iran with their newborn baby before the court issued its verdict. According to the International Cities of Refuge Network (ICORN) website, the family “went to Dubai and then to Malaysia. But Malaysia has an expatriation agreement with Iran, so they weren’t safe. After eight months in Kuala Lumpur, she was told that her application to ICORN had been accepted and she was to be one of their guest writers.”
Doostdar now lives in Sweden and works as a freelance journalist.
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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