by Steve Dew-Jones | 9 Apr 2020 | Features
Arash (John) Sedigh with his wife Azam and their five-year-old son Samuel. Arash Sedigh went to the UN offices in Makassar, Indonesia for more than 250 days in a row last year to plead for his family’s resettlement to be made a priority. It is approaching seven years...
by Steve Dew-Jones | 3 Apr 2020 | News
Mahrokh Ghanbari (right) has been told she does not need to return to prison. Aylar Bakhtari (left) and Amin Khaki have had their leave extended by 15 days. A 62-year-old Iranian woman convert to Christianity has been told she does not need to return to prison to...
by Steve Dew-Jones | 18 Mar 2020 | News
The UK’s new guidelines for asylum cases involving Iranian Christian converts acknowledge there is a “real risk” of persecution for “ordinary” Christians in Iran, and not just leaders or those with a “particularly evangelical zeal”. The guidelines have been...
by Steve Dew-Jones | 17 Mar 2020 | News
Clockwise from top left: Nasser Navard Gol-Tapeh, Zaman Fadaie, Mohammad Reza Omidi, and Yousef Nadarkhani. Four Iranian Christians serving ten-year sentences in Tehran’s Evin Prison are being denied temporary release even though their requests for retrials have been...
by Steve Dew-Jones | 13 Mar 2020 | News
A Christian convert serving two years in internal exile in a remote southeastern Iranian city has had his exile extended for a further 11 months owing to an unauthorised leave of absence. Ebrahim Firouzi, who is 34, began his exile on 12 November 2019, just two weeks...
by Steve Dew-Jones | 10 Mar 2020 | News
The UN’s Special Rapporteur on Human Rights in Iran has called for the release of all prisoners of conscience, even those on security-related charges, amid fears the coronavirus could spread rapidly within Iran’s overcrowded prisons. Javaid Rehman, speaking...
by Steve Dew-Jones | 9 Mar 2020 | Features
By Mary Mohammadi The following is an English translation of an interview conducted by Christian convert Fatemeh (Mary) Mohammadi with Arian Soodmand, youngest daughter of Pastor Hossein Soodmand, who was executed for apostasy in 1990. When and how did the pressure...
by Steve Dew-Jones | 5 Mar 2020 | News
Christian convert Esmaeil Maghrebinezhad has been sentenced to an additional two years in prison. The 65-year-old was sentenced in January to three years in prison for “insulting Islamic sacred beliefs”. Now, following a court hearing on 17 February, he has been...
by Steve Dew-Jones | 5 Mar 2020 | News
Clockwise from top-left: Mohammad Vafadar, Kamal Naamanian, Hossein Kadivar, Khalil Dehghanpour, Behnam Akhlaghi, Mehdi Khatibi, Babak Hosseinzadeh, Shahrooz Eslamdoust and Abdolreza (Matthias) Ali-Haghnejad. (Middle East Concern) Nine converts have lost...
by Steve Dew-Jones | 4 Mar 2020 | News
Amin Khaki and Mahrokh Ghanbari have been granted 36 days’ leave from prison. Six Christians were among the more than 54,000 prisoners released from custody in Iran over the past week, as part of efforts to limit the spread of the coronavirus. Article18 has...
