Six Members of the Parliamentary Judicial Commission to Visit Evin Prison on Tuesday

After it was announced that a visit by a delegation of parliamentarians to Evin Prison, scheduled for Sunday, was canceled due to "adverse weather conditions," the spokesperson for the Judicial Commission of Parliament announced that six members of this commission would visit Evin on Tuesday. Following the recent nationwide protests in Iran and reports of the deaths of several detainees in custody, which came with warnings from representatives about the possibility of a repeat of "Kahrizak II," a group of parliamentarians requested to visit Evin Prison. This request was approved by the judiciary after several days of delay, and it was initially announced that six members of the Judicial Commission, along with one member of the National Security Committee, would form the visiting delegation. The number of this delegation later increased to ten, and it was decided that Fatemeh Saidi would also accompany as one of the female representatives. However, Hassan Norouzi, the spokesperson for the Judicial Commission, told the state news agency IRNA that only six members of this commission would attend the visit on Tuesday. He emphasized that this action is "in line with visiting the situation of detainees from the recent unrest." This statement comes as the Tehran prosecutor claimed on Sunday that only ten of the recent detainees from protests in Tehran are in Evin Prison, and the status of the remaining detainees has been clarified. Abbas Jafari Dolatabadi also urged the judges of Evin Prosecutor's Office to expedite the determination of the status of these ten individuals. The Tehran prosecutor also announced that 95 indictments have been issued for the accused in the recent protests. In the early days of the nationwide protests in December 2017, Iranian police and judicial officials provided scattered statistics on the number of detainees, but information in this regard faced delays, and even the governor of Isfahan stated in response to a question about the number of detainees in that province that he was not authorized to provide information. However, later Mahmoud Sadeghi, a member of parliament, announced that the total number of detainees in various cities of Iran exceeded three thousand and seven hundred. The issue of parliamentarians visiting Evin Prison has its critics, including Emadeddin Baghi, a former political prisoner, who believes that if these visits are not conducted by an independent delegation, they are pointless. Meanwhile, the lack of information regarding the identity and status of detainees has led to protests from organizations and human rights activists, including Asma Jahangir, the UN Special Rapporteur on human rights in Iran, who expressed concern about the detainees and called on Iranian officials to publish the names of the arrested individuals.