Evin Prison - Reactions

Reactions

In August 2009, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad commented in a live broadcast on the state radio on rape and torture in the Iranian prisons and said; "In some detention centers inappropriate measures have taken place for which the enemy was again responsible."

Following the election, Iranian presidential candidate Mehdi Karroubi said that several male and female protesters held behind bars have been savagely raped, according to a confidential letter to powerful cleric Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani. Karroubi warned that this was only a "fragment" of the evidence he had and that if the denials did not stop, he would release even more.

Roxana Saberi, who spent 100 days in Evin in 2009, accused of espionage and threatening Iran’s national security. She had been living in Iran for six years, working as a journalist and writing a book about modern Iran based on interviews with a broad cross-section of society, when she was detained. She later described her ordeal in a book, titled 'Between Two Worlds: My Life and Captivity in Iran' (2010).

It is said, that rape has been used by interrogators in Iran for decades. During the 1980s, the rape of female political prisoners was prevalent. It was so prevalent that it prompted Hussein-Ali Montazeri, who was Ayatollah Khomeini’s deputy at the time, to write the following to Khomeini in a letter dated October 7, 1986: "Did you know that young women are raped in some of the prisons of the Islamic Republic?"

Two prominent members of Iran’s human rights community, the feminist lawyer and journalist Shadi Sadr and the blogger and activist Mojtaba Saminejad, published essays online from inside Iran arguing that far from being a new phenomenon, prison rape has a long history in the Islamic Republic.