TEHRAN (AFP) - Iranian Nobel peace laureate Shirin Ebadi has complained to the UN Human Rights Council over the “arbitrary detention” of US-Iranian academic Haleh Esfandiari and asked for her release.
“I request that measures be taken that my client be freed as soon as possible and get a fair and open trial,” Ebadi said on Monday in a letter addressed to the council’s arbitrary arrests working group, a copy of which was faxed to AFP.
She described Esfandiari’s three-month detention on suspicion of harming national security as a “clear example of arbitrary arrests.”
“My client has been kept in solitary confinement since May 8, is denied visits and deprived from all the rights considered for prisoners in the Iranian law,” said Ebadi, a human rights lawyer and 2003 Nobel peace laureate.
“I have asked for a visit with my client several times, which was not accepted and I have not even been allowed to study the case.”
Iran’s judiciary said on Tuesday that the probe was still ongoing into the case of Esfandiari, 68, who heads the Middle East programme at the Washington-based Woodrow Wilson International Centre for Scholars.
Last month Iran’s state television aired televised interviews of Esfandiari and another detained US-Iranian, Kian Tajbakhsh, apparently implicating themselves in alleged US efforts to topple Iran’s clerical authorities.
The scholar was arrested following a visit to Tehran to see her ailing mother.
