CBC News has reported that a professor from Montreal who has been\u00a0imprisoned in Iran since June\u00a0was recently hospitalized,\u00a0is barely conscious\u00a0and can hardly walk or talk,\u00a0according to family.
\n\u00a0Homa Hoodfar, an anthropologist at Concordia University, is being kept in solitary confinement nearly three months after her arrest in Tehran on June 6 while on a personal and research visit to Iran, said her niece, Amanda Ghahremani.
\n Hoodfar’s family says Iranian authorities have refused regular visits by her lawyer\u00a0and have tried to dismiss him. During his one visit in July, he was forbidden to discuss her case and has been denied all access to her legal file, the family said.\u00a0
\nShe has had only one other visitor, a few weeks ago, who informed the family\u00a0Hoodfar\u00a0had been hospitalized\u00a0at one point\u00a0before being returned to her cell.\u00a0
\n“It has become clear that the authorities are not prioritizing her health and do not intend to respect Homa’s due process rights under Iranian law,” Ghahremani said.
\nHoodfar is 65 and suffers from a rare neurological disease called\u00a0myasthenia gravis, which causes severe muscle weakness.
\n“My aunt is an academic. She’s not an activist,” Ghahremani\u00a0said. “She has never violated any Iranian law. She’s always worked \u2026 within the parameters of the constitution and Islamic strictures.”\u00a0
\nTwo days before her departure back to Canada in March, she was visited by the counter-intelligence unit of Iran’s\u00a0Revolutionary Guards, who seized her computer and passport and told her not to leave the country. After interrogation at Evin prison in June, she was arrested and since then has had no contact with her family.
\nIranian authorities have charged her with collaborating with a hostile government against national security and with propaganda against the state \u2014\u00a0charges her family calls trumped-up.
\nThe charges were never presented to her lawyer\u00a0and\u00a0instead were published in the Iranian press, quoting the prosecutor as saying Hoodfar\u00a0was “dabbling in feminism”.\u00a0A court set terms for her to be released on bail, but her lawyer’s numerous attempts\u00a0to post bail have been ignored.
\n“We were asked by the Iranian judicial authorities to tone down the media on Homa’s case in order to allow the legal process to take its course,” Ghahremani said. “The court has blatantly and repeatedly violated Iran’s own laws.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
CBC News has reported that a professor from Montreal who has been\u00a0imprisoned in Iran since June\u00a0was recently hospitalized,\u00a0is barely conscious\u00a0and can hardly walk or talk,\u00a0according to family. \u00a0Homa Hoodfar, an anthropologist at Concordia University, is being kept in solitary confinement nearly three months after her arrest in Tehran on June 6 while on a personal […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9,"featured_media":1128,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[441,438,439,12,442,443,440],"class_list":["post-1127","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","tag-confinement","tag-homa","tag-hoodfar","tag-iran","tag-montreal","tag-propaganda","tag-solitary"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/rasanah-iiis.org\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1127","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/rasanah-iiis.org\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/rasanah-iiis.org\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rasanah-iiis.org\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/9"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rasanah-iiis.org\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1127"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/rasanah-iiis.org\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1127\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1129,"href":"https:\/\/rasanah-iiis.org\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1127\/revisions\/1129"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rasanah-iiis.org\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1128"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/rasanah-iiis.org\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1127"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rasanah-iiis.org\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1127"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rasanah-iiis.org\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1127"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}