TEHRAN -- Iran’s judiciary Wednesday said that there was no problem for Nobel peace prizewinner and rights lawyer Shirin Ebadi to defend a prominent US-Iranian scholar being detained by Tehran.
Ebadi, who has been appointed a defense lawyer for Haleh Esfandiari by her family, had strongly protested Monday that she was being denied access to her client.
Justice ministry spokesman Ali Reza Jamshidi said that he had discussed the issue with Tehran’s deputy prosecutor for security issues Hassan Hadad and “he told me that the information given by Shirin Ebadi is denied.”
“There is no problem for her to be the lawyer and carry out her legal job with freedom, as she has done before,” he added.
Ebadi said in a statement Tuesday that she had been to Tehran’s revolutionary court for a meeting with prosecutors but was told that Esfandiari “did not need a lawyer.”
“Anything that my client says in prison is legally invalid and legal authorities are responsible for her health and security since they deprived her of her citizens’ rights by overlooking the relevant laws,” she said.
Esfandiari heads the Middle East program at the Washington-based Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. She was arrested after returning to Iran late last year to visit her ailing 93-year-old mother.
Jamshidi said that Esfandiari, 67, is in “complete health and by next week God willing it will be easier for her family to meet her.”
Iran has also said that it is holding in jail US-Iranian Kian Tajbakhsh, an urban planning expert, and California-based US-Iranian businessman Ali Shakeri on the same charges as Esfandiari.
A fourth US-Iranian, Parnaz 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.
