Month: January 2019

The UK government today launched an independent review into the persecution of Christians globally.

Foreign Secretary Jeremy Hunt said the review would focus especially on “key countries” in the Middle East, Asia and Africa, where the severest persecution of Christians is believed to occur.

Among them will no doubt be Iran, which was ranked the 9th hardest place to be a Christian on Open Doors’ 2019 World Watch List.

Article18 noted in its inaugural annual report earlier this month that there was an “unprecedented” wave of arrests of Christians in Iran ahead of Christmas 2018: 114 Christians were arrested in just one week across ten different cities, following raids on private house gatherings of Christians – known as “house churches”.

Those arrests have continued into 2019. In the past few days, Article18 has reported on the arrests of two more Christian converts: Sina Moloudian, 26, in Isfahan, and Ismaeil Maghrebinejad, 64, in Shiraz.

“The Iranian regime feels under siege,” says Article18’s Advocacy Director, Mansour Borji, “And with the rising unrest resultant from economic hardship as a consequence of sanctions and widespread corruption, they are cracking down on civil liberties.

“They seem to have began this campaign of terror by arresting and detaining groups that they feel most vulnerable against. This includes human rights activists, who expose injustice and corruption, and religious groups like Christians, whose continued growth exposes the weak legitimacy and broken monopoly of the theocratic state.”

The UK government’s review is set to conclude by Easter, which this year falls on 21 April.

The Foreign Office estimated that 215 million Christians worldwide faced discrimination or abuse in 2018.

Hunt said recommendations made following the review would be used to build a “cohesive and comprehensive policy response”.

“So often the persecution of Christians is a telling warning sign of the persecution of every minority,” he said. 

“We wanted to do this not just because freedom of worship is a fundamental human right, but also because freedom of worship is the invisible line between open societies and closed societies.”

Amnesty International has called 2018 Iran’s “year of shame” for its “chilling” crackdown on the rights to freedom of expression, association and peaceful assembly.

The charity’s new report, which focuses on the more than 7,000 people arrested for partaking in protests against poverty, corruption and authoritarianism, also highlights Iran’s “intensified discriminatory crackdowns against religious and ethnic minorities by arbitrarily arresting and imprisoning hundreds, and curtailing their access to education, employment and other services”.

Citing Article18, Amnesty notes that “at least 171 Christians were arrested in 2018 solely for peacefully practising their faith… Some received sentences of up to 15 years in prison”.

Last week, Article18’s inaugural annual report revealed that at least 14 Christians were still in prison in Iran at the start of 2019, after an unprecedented wave of raids on “house churches” at the end of 2018 led to over 100 Christians being arrested in just one week. 

Amnesty’s report, released today, also highlights Iran’s repression of other religious minorities, including Gonabadi dervishes and Bahá’ís.

“Hundreds [of dervishes] were arrested and more than 200 were sentenced to a total of 1,080 years in prison, 5,995 lashes as well as internal ‘exile’, travel bans, and bans on joining political and social groups,” Amnesty says.

One dervish was reportedly sentenced to death after a “grossly unfair trial”, then “swiftly executed”.

Meanwhile, Amnesty notes that an administrator of the Majzooban-e-Noor website, which reports on human rights abuses against the dervishes, was sentenced to 26 years and three months in prison and 148 lashes.

At least 95 Bahá’ís were “arbitrarily detained”, according to Amnesty, citing data from the Bahá’í International Community. 

“Throughout 2018 the Iranian authorities have sought to crush the spirits of protesters and human rights defenders demanding respect for human rights by carrying out mass arrests and even grotesque flogging sentences,” commented Philip Luther, MENA Research and Advocacy Director at Amnesty International, in his concluding remark.

“Governments which are engaged in dialogue with Iran must not stay silent while the net of repression rapidly widens. They must speak out in the strongest terms against the crackdown and forcefully call on the Iranian authorities to immediately and unconditionally release all those jailed for peacefully expressing their right to freedom of expression, association and assembly, including through their human rights activism.”

The spiritual leader of Iran’s Sunni minority says the country’s religious minorities continue to suffer discrimination, despite the pledges of the leaders of the revolution to ensure equal treatment for all.

Molavi Abdol-Hamid, 72, speaking to Radio Farda, noted that nearly four decades since the revolution that made Twelver Imams’ Shi’a the religion of the state, the constitution still prevents members of minority religions, such as Sunnis, Christians, Jews and Zoroastrians, from serving in high state positions.

After years of writing unanswered letters to Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Abdol-Hamid received a surprise response in September 2017.

In a letter published on the state-state-run news agency ISNA, Khamenei said the Iranian regime was “duty-bound” by the “pillars of the Islamic Republic” not to discriminate against its citizens.

However, at the same time, Article 12 of the constitution proclaims that Twelver Imans’ Shi’a is the official denomination of Iran, while Article 115 stipulates that the roles of Supreme Leader and President must be held only by Shi’ites.

Abdol-Hamid, who is the Friday Prayer Leader of Zahedan, noted that in the Sunni-majority province of Sistan & Baluchestan, only six to 12 per cent of public employees are Sunnis.

He added that Shi’ite leaders continue to “promote discrimination” against Sunnis, who make up around 9% of the population, “as a necessity”, and “use their influence to deprive Sunnis of the right to serve in high public positions”.

Abdol-Hamid said Iran’s leaders, including President Hassan Rouhani, were “well informed of these facts” but had failed to “take the necessary steps towards addressing the problem”.

Christian convert Nasser Navard Gol-Tapeh is now one year into his ten-year jail sentence for “acting against national security through the establishment of ‘house churches’”.

Nasser, who is 57 years old, was first arrested in June 2016 alongside three Azerbaijanis at a private gathering. All four Christians were detained for over four months, including two months each in solitary confinement, before they were released after paying bail of 100 million tomans each (around $35,000). 

The Azerbaijanis returned to their homes and families after their release and will not be forced to return to Iran to serve their sentences. But after his appeal was rejected in November 2017, Nasser was taken to Tehran’s Evin Prison on 20 January 2018 to begin his sentence.

He has been denied medical treatment on several occasions, despite one of his family members telling Article18 he may lose all his teeth if not treated.

In August 2018, Nasser wrote an open letter to the authorities, asking: “Would it even be possible for a committed Christian – who was born and raised in Iran and whose forefathers lived in this land for thousands of years, and who is a servant to the God who has called him to a ministry of reconciliation – to act against the national security of his own country?”

He added: “Is the fellowship of a few Christian brothers and sisters in someone’s home, singing worship songs, reading the Bible and worshipping God acting against national security?

“Isn’t it a clear violation of civil and human rights, and an absolute injustice, to receive a ten-year prison sentence just for organising ‘house churches’, which is a sanctuary sanctified as a place to praise and worship God due to closure of churches in Iran?”

After his appeal failed, Nasser’s lawyer, Hussein Ahmadi-Niyaz, told Article18: “Throughout their interrogation process these detained Christians have emphasised that their relationship had purely a religious nature. They prayed together and spoke about the Bible.

“There has been no confession, neither is there any evidence that they wanted to overthrow or undermine the security of the state.” 

Article18 calls for Nasser’s immediate release, and for the release of all other Christians in prison solely because of their faith. The International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which Iran ratified in 1975, guarantees the right to freedom of religion, including the right to hold a religion of one’s choosing and to propagate that religion.

Tomorrow will be the 25th anniversary of the extrajudicial killing of Haik Hovsepian, one of several Christian leaders found dead in suspicious circumstances in the early 1990s in Iran.

Haik was the first chairman of Iran’s Council of Protestant Churches and superintendent of the country’s Assemblies of God denomination.

His family was notified of his death 11 days after his disappearance, on 30 January 1994. He was found with multiple stab wounds to his chest.

His disappearance came three days after the release of another pastor, Mehdi Dibaj, who had been sentenced to death for apostasy and had spent the past 10 years in prison. Haik had been one of the main campaigners for his release.

Six months later, Mehdi was also abducted and killed.

Haik left a wife, Takoosh, and four surviving children, Rebecca, Joseph, Gilbert and Andre (the couple’s first child died in a car accident in 1969 at the age of just six months), who left Iran five years after his death and resettled in California.

Haik’s wife and children have continued to support the Church in Iran through the charity they founded in 2007, Hovsepian Ministries.

Reflecting on the anniversary of her husband’s death, Takoosh told Article18:

“25 years has passed since Haik’s martyrdom. I have learnt a lot throughout these years. Although losing a loving and caring husband has not been easy, but I learned to trust God and praise him in all circumstances. The fruits of Haik’s martyrdom, his legacy and the testimonies that I still hear from Iranians and how their life was impacted by Haik’s sacrifice, gives me comfort and strength.”

Haik was a fierce campaigner for religious freedom in Iran. A year before his death, in November 1992, he called upon the UN Special Rapporteur for Human Rights in Iran, Reynaldo Galindo Pohl, to petition for “true religious freedom” in Iran, based “not on ethnic or religious identity, but on personal conviction”.

He also refused to sign a statement declaring that Christians in Iran enjoyed religious freedom and pledging that converts to Christianity would be banned from his church.

Twenty-five years after his death, the rights of Christians and other religious minorities in Iran continue to be violated, as Article18 has documented in its inaugural annual report, released yesterday.

At the end of 2018, an unprecedented wave of raids on private house gatherings of Christians in ten different cities led to 114 arrests in one week alone.

Dozens more Christians were arrested over the course of the year – with some of them subjected to violent physical assaults and one woman reporting that during her interrogation she was subjected to sexually abusive interrogation.

At the start of 2019, at least 14 Christians remained in prison, detained on spurious charges related to their faith or religious activity.