Arrest of Secretary General of the Iranian Teachers' Trade Union

Ismail Abdi, the Secretary General of the Iranian Teachers' Trade Union, was arrested on Saturday, July 6, after visiting Evin Prison. According to the Teacher and Worker Rights website, Mr. Abdi was interrogated for hours at Evin Prison before his arrest. Last week, when he intended to travel to Armenia and obtain a Canadian visa to attend the seventh congress of the World Teachers' Organization, he was informed at the border that he was banned from leaving the country. Additionally, Mr. Abdi was instructed to present himself to the Judicial Deputy of the Prosecutor's Office on Wednesday. He complied and was asked to go to Evin Prison, where he was subsequently arrested while trying to follow up on the reason for his travel ban. The Teacher and Worker Rights website reported that over 70 people were staging a sit-in in front of Evin Prison at the same time as Mr. Abdi's introduction and interrogation. So far, judicial authorities have not provided explanations regarding the reasons for the arrest of the Secretary General of the Iranian Teachers' Trade Union, but reports from Iran indicate that this action is related to his 10-year prison sentence. Ismail Abdi had been arrested four times between 2006 and 2009. In 2011, he was sentenced to 10 years in prison by the Revolutionary Court of Tehran on security charges. Earlier, the Kaleme website, close to Mir Hossein Mousavi, reported that Mr. Abdi had been summoned to the Ministry of Intelligence in Tehran in May and threatened after three hours of interrogation that his 10-year prison sentence would be enforced if he did not resign from his position. This teacher's rights activist did resign, but the Iranian Teachers' Trade Union did not accept it. In recent months, following widespread protests and gatherings by teachers in Tehran and dozens of cities across Iran, security and judicial actions against teachers' rights activists have intensified. Among them, according to the Kaleme website, Mahmoud Beheshti Langroudi, the spokesperson for the Iranian Teachers' Trade Union, was also summoned to the Ministry of Intelligence in May and threatened to resign from his position, which was met with opposition from the Iranian Teachers' Trade Union. Additionally, the arrest of Alireza Hashemi, Secretary General of the Iranian Teachers' Organization, can be noted. Mr. Hashemi was arrested in April to serve his five-year prison sentence, having been sentenced to five years in prison on security charges in 2010. Currently, in addition to Mr. Abdi and Mr. Hashemi, several other teachers' rights activists such as Rasoul Badaghi and Alireza Ghanbari are imprisoned on security charges. In this context, thousands of teachers across various cities in Iran held a 'silent gathering' to protest their situation, highlighting the dire economic conditions teachers face, with a petition from six thousand Iranian teachers stating that they live below the poverty line.