Extrajudicial Pressures on Cultural Activists; Three Teachers Refuse to Attend Court

The Teachers' Union of Kurdistan, Marivan, and Sarvabad criticized the "extrajudicial and illegal pressures" on cultural activists on Tuesday, July 18, announcing that three teachers from Kurdistan had been summoned to court but refused to attend. In a statement, they wrote that Soran Eskandar Lotfi, Shaban Mohammadi, and Masoud Nikkhah "refused to attend their court hearing on Tuesday in protest against illegal and extrajudicial processes." According to the statement published on the Telegram channel of the Coordination Council of Iranian Teachers' Unions, the 15th branch of the Islamic Revolutionary Court of Tehran had summoned these three union activists last week via a phone call without any formal notification to the defendants or their lawyers. Shiva Amali Rad, a teachers' union activist residing in Canada, noted in an interview with Voice of America that during the arrests in May of last year, "more than 230 teachers, including these three teachers from Marivan, were detained." She stated that Soran Eskandar Lotfi, spokesperson for the Coordination Council of Iranian Teachers' Unions, and Shaban Mohammadi and Masoud Nikkhah, members of the board of the Marivan Teachers' Union, "spent six months in the detention centers of the Revolutionary Guards and the Ministry of Intelligence." Amali Rad further added that these teachers were under pressure from security agents for months regarding issues related to a meeting with the representative of the French teachers' union, Cecile Kohler, "to extract forced confessions." Cecile Kohler and her husband, Jacques Paris, French union activists, were arrested during their trip to Iran last May and are currently imprisoned on charges of espionage. According to Shiva Amali Rad, security agents attempted last year to "link the Jina uprising to the meeting of workers and teachers with these two French individuals by releasing fabricated clips." This union activist emphasized that Soran Eskandar Lotfi, Shaban Mohammadi, and Masoud Nikkhah were released on December 5 of last year after posting a bail of 2.5 billion tomans. The Teachers' Union of Kurdistan, Marivan, and Sarvabad condemned the "illegal processes of the judicial system against union activists across the country" and emphasized that "governance through torture and medieval cruelty is doomed to failure." Recently, an appeals court upheld a six-year prison sentence for Sara Siahpour, a teacher and member of the Tehran Teachers' Union, on charges of "collusion and conspiracy against national security" and "propaganda against the regime." Many critics and opponents of the Islamic Republic have been arrested, tortured, and imprisoned over the years on charges such as "collusion and conspiracy against national security," "propaganda against the regime," and "collaboration with hostile countries." These actions have drawn widespread criticism both in Iran and globally. "Imprisoned teachers must be freed," is the slogan of educators during a protest gathering in Shiraz – Tuesday, July 18. A six-year prison sentence for a teacher; a campaign of 100,000 signatures for the release of imprisoned teachers has begun. The Minister of Education stated: "We must think about teachers' activities in cyberspace." The challenge of "grading papers" in Iran's educational system; threatening text messages sent to protesting teachers.