Swiss diplomats seeking to visit Haleh Esfandiari, a leading Iranian-American academic jailed in Iran, have not been given access to her, the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars said yesterday.
In addition, Shirin Ebadi, the Nobel Peace Prize winner and lawyer who has taken on Ms. Esfandiari’s defense, confirmed yesterday that two lawyers from her office had been denied permission to visit their client but she said that they would continue their efforts.
Iran announced Monday that Ms. Esfandiari was being accused of trying to foment a velvet revolution there. The Wilson Center and her family had avoided asking the United States or other governments to intervene until she was sent to Evin prison two weeks ago. The Swiss government, which runs the American Interests Section in Tehran in the absence of diplomatic relations between the United States and Iran, requested that a consular official be allowed to visit Ms. Esfandiari but no such visit was granted, Lee H. Hamilton, the director of the Wilson Center in Washington, said at a news conference there.
He said other governments had intervened on Ms. Esfandiari’s behalf since she was jailed on May 8, but declined to say which ones. The Swiss Embassy in Washington referred questions to the State Department’s Office of Iranian Affairs, which did not return several telephone calls seeking comment.
Ms. Esfandiari’s mother was allowed to deliver medicine to the prison for her daughter, but all relatives were also barred from seeing her, said Mr. Hamilton, who repeated his assertion that the charges against Ms. Esfandiari were baseless.
“Iran is trying to turn a scholar into a spy,” he said. “Haleh is a renowned scholar and spent much of her life trying to enhance the conversation and dialogue between this country and countries in the Middle East, including Iran.”
Ms. Esfandiari, 67, director of the Middle East program at the Wilson Center, went to Iran five months ago on one of her twice-annual visits to her mother, who is 93 and ill. When she tried to leave last December, she was prevented from going.
Tehran habitually denies political prisoners the right to see a lawyer and prohibits lawyers from even reviewing case files, Ms. Ebadi said through a translator in a telephone interview from Atlanta. She has been on a book tour in the United States and expects to return to Iran on June 8.
She said that two lawyers from her office in Tehran would continue to press the Revolutionary Court but that in the past it had taken up to a year, until interrogations were over, before permission was granted. She called it a typical case in which the judiciary demands that citizens obey the law but ignores the law itself.
Ms. Ebadi said that she had known Ms. Esfandiari for years, and that the professor, who holds American and Iranian nationality, had asked her mother to hire Ms. Ebadi during one of the brief telephone calls she made from prison. “An academic person like her can’t pose a threat to national security, and if the government does think that, it is a sign of weakness,” Ms. Ebadi said.
