The Iranian regime is among the world’s leading human rights violators. Following the “Woman, Life, Freedom” movement protests, Iranian security officials increased the number of political prisoners the regime holds by thousands. As prison space dwindles, the regime sentences many to house arrest.
The regime utilizes surveillance equipment to track the location of dissidents and forces prisoners to pay the costs of the monitors and their operations. The Organization of Prisons and Security and Educational Measures overseas the house arrest of thousands of political activists, human rights activists, women’s rights activists, and Baha’is. As it has improved its system, the judiciary and intelligence agencies have been able to expand the scope of repression and avoid the capture-and-release that marked earlier periods of protest. Women’s rights activists are the largest group of dissidents forced to wear ankle monitors.
On August 1, 2023, Elham Modarresi, a well-known artist and human rights activist, escaped to Turkey. Iranian security officials had arrested her in Karaj on November 2, 2022, for participating in the Woman, Life, Freedom movement. After her repeated torture, solitary confinement, hunger strike, and liver failure, the authorities released her into house arrest in March 2023, perhaps so she would not die in prison.
The regime utilizes surveillance equipment to track the location of dissidents and forces prisoners to pay the costs of the monitors.
The Organization of Prisons fitted her with an ankle monitor to allow the Intelligence Ministry to track her should she leave her house. After she escaped, she shared photographs of the monitors manufactured by HamiTec, an Iranian company based in Tehran. According to its chief executive officer, Amir Hossein Azizian, the goal of HamiTec’s electronic tags is to enable the house arrest of 60,000 prisoners; more than six times the number of prisoners were using his product as of December 20, 2023. Azizian explained that two SIM cards enable the monitor to provide the location of a prisoner to the company and the Organization of Prisons simultaneously. By duplicating SIM cards, the product can continue to locate prisoners even when military forces disrupt GPS signals.
While U.S. and European officials express solidarity with Iranian protestors, sanctions targeted on HamiTec, Azizian and peer companies could assist their plight by undermining the ability of the company to mass produce devices meant to repress the population. This in turn would make it difficult for the regime to impose sentences on a scale far beyond its capacity to house prisoners.
The United States and Europe talk about human rights, but too often, they do not target their sanctions to the breadth of the structure of oppression within Iran. Certainly, sanctioning Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and other regime leaders is welcome, but pursuing sanctions against those who support incarceration remains a necessary step that should receive bipartisan support.
