TEHERAN - Iranian Nobel peace laureate Shirin Ebadi on Monday urged the judiciary to free US-Iranian scholar Haleh Esfandiari, whom she said was kept in solitary confinement for 40 days.
In a letter obtained by AFP, Ebadi urged judiciary head Ayatollah Mahmoud Hashemi Shahrudi to order the immediate release of Esfandiari and also allow US-Iranian journalist Parnaz Azima to leave the country.
‘The politically accused are denied the rights enshrined in law for ordinary defendants... I hope your positive order will put an end to this treatment and my defendants are freed soon and return home,’ wrote Ebadi.
Ebadi, who was appointed Esfandiari’s lawyer by her family, complained that she has been denied access to her client and that the judiciary refused her request to release the scholar on bail.
‘My defendant has been kept in solitary confinement for 40 days, denied visits, and the case inspector refuses my representation fearing it might improve her spirit and give her strength to resist,’ she said.
Citing the 10,000-dollar bail sum of a rapist in a recent case Ebadi said: ‘The punishment for rape is execution, how is it that a scholar and a journalist are regarded so dangerous in the eyes of justice that one has to be locked up and the other is banned from leaving the country?’
Azima who works for Radio Free Europe’s Persian language arm, has had her passport confiscated and has been unable to leave the country for six months despite paying a hefty 500,000-dollar bail.
Prosecutors have accused Esfandiari, who heads the Middle East programme at the Washington-based Woodrow Wilson Centre, and two other US-Iranians of espionage and acting against national security.
Azima has been accused of working for a ‘counter-revolutionary’ radio station. Both women had returned to Iran to visit ailing mothers.
