The trial of the Iranian feminist and human rights activist, Shiva Nazar Ahari, known for her courage and tenacity in and out of prison, arrested and imprisoned nine months ago, is due on Saturday September 4th. She has been accused of “acting against national security,” “collusion to commit crimes,” and waging war against God.” This last accusation-“moharebeh” in religious judicial terminology-is punishable by hanging: Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and the Human Rights Commission of the EU have taken up her case in response to the Campaign in Support of Shiva Nazar Ahari (http//www.chrr.biz/shiva/index-en.php).
Shiva Nazar Ahari ´s real crime, however, is that she is member of “Human Rights Reporters in Iran,” active in relation to the children of immigrant Afghani parents in Iran, street children, child workers, women´s rights and the rights of political prisoners. She was first arrested at the age of twenty in 2002 and was released on bail after three weeks. Her second arrest was in 2004 outside the UN office in Tehran. She was released after twenty days, but was later condemned to one year suspended prison sentence. Shiva was arrested a third time in June 2009, after the contested presidential elections, and kept in jail for 102 days and released against heavy bail. She was arrested a second time in the same year when she was sitting on the same bus with a number of well known feminists and human rights activists on the way to Ghom to participate in the burial ceremony of the ostracized Ayatullah Montazeri. While those who were arrested were freed after a few hours, Shiva, who had recently published an interview with a political prisoner, drawing attention to the use of sexual violence and abuse of women political prisoners , was kept in jail. She has just been transferred from isolation to the communal ward of Evin prison.
Shiva, a former university student banned from continuing her education is under 30. She belongs to the generation of young Iranian activists who, instead of being conditioned by the educational programming of the Islamic Republic, have chosen its alternative by promoting citizenship rights embedded in the universal declarations of human rights. Three years ago Shiva wrote a piece about the arrest of a young feminist on her blog titled “I’m scared of staying alive in this dump at any cost”: “…they were sent to Evin in order to add the lessons of resistance to everything else they had learnt so far…so that the high walls of the isolation cell and its numbing solitude should prepare them for the more difficult days ahead. No law is needed in this land to enable you to scream ‘for which crime are you taking our children to the solitude of Evin prison and make them sit blind folded on a chair facing the interrogator.’ There is no need for laws, for the law is…the wishes of the Ministry of Information and its agents who earn their bread by abusing these kids. Strange that they don’t realize that the day is at hand when this same bread will get stuck in their throats and suffocate them.”
What she is describing could well be her present situation in prison. She is kept in Evin to be made an example of, in the hope that the voice of protest of her generation can be stifled.
The picture shows Shiva carrying masonry on her shoulder when she was repairing the office of the children’s rights centre where she carried out her voluntary work.
