TEHRAN -- Nobel prize winner and lawyer Shirin Ebadi said Wednesday that she was still being denied access to jailed US-Iranian scholar Haleh Esfandiari after Iran’s judiciary said that access was no problem.
Ebadi, appointed Esfandiari’s lawyer by her family, said in a fax that “Wednesday I went to the investigating judge in the revolutionary court, and just like Monday I was not allowed in to see her.”
The peace laureate said that she went to Evin prison, where Esfandiari is being held pending a possible trial, where the deputy public prosecutor “declined me permission to meet my client.”
“My client is in prison in solitary confinement and is prohibited any visit and thus deprived of her citizen’s rights and does not have the right to a lawyer,” she added.
Justice ministry spokesman Ali Reza Jamshidi Tuesday 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.
However, Monday, Ebadi said that she went to Tehran’s revolutionary court for a meeting with prosecutors but was told that Esfandiari “did not need a lawyer.”
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.
