The photo dates back to 7 years ago, in 2009 we organized a glorious march in Sulaimaniyah (Kurdistan-Iraq region) to protest the execution of Hussein Khezri, a Kurdish political prisoner.

In this photo, I have a picture of Ms. Zeinab Jalalian, who was in prison for almost two years at the time and was sentenced to death.

Her death sentence was later commuted to life imprisonment. But she suffers from several diseases as a result of physical and mental torture.

As her mother said in a video message a few days ago, she has not seen her daughter for 15 years, but that is not all.

For more than a year, Ms. Jalalian’s family and lawyers have not known where she is being held. She is not even allowed to make phone calls.

Last year, Amnesty International issued an urgent action call stating that Iranian Ministry of Intelligence agents had tortured Kurdish prisoner Zeinab Jalalian by barring her from accessing medical services in order to force her to “confess” against her. Take a video camera.

At the end of its call for immediate action, the human rights organization called on citizens to write a letter to the Iranian authorities using the text proposed by Amnesty International, asking them to:

According to the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention, Zeinab Jalalian should be released immediately and her right to compensation should be guaranteed.

Until her release, Zeinab Jalalian should receive adequate medical care, including transfer to out-of-prison centers for inaccessible in-prison treatment;

Be protected from torture and other ill-treatment; And transferred to a prisoner closer to home and family.

Initiate an impartial, effective, independent, and prompt investigation into his allegations of torture and other ill-treatment, and bring all those responsible to justice in fair trials without resorting to the death penalty.

And remind them that harassing and arresting prisoners’s family members in order to disrupt their public campaigns in support of their loved ones violates international law and standards.

Despite this and other requests, the authorities of the Islamic Republic of Iran not only did not review the sentence issued against these Kurdish political prisoners, but also tortured Ms. Jalalian by deporting her and not informing and isolating her, and this torture continued. Continues.

Zeinab Jalalian was born in 1980 in the village of “Dim Gheshlagh” in Mako city in West Azerbaijan province. He was arrested in Kermanshah in March 2007, and after months of being held in solitary confinement in the city’s intelligence office and subjected to severe physical and psychological torture by the Islamic Revolutionary Tribunal on charges of “acting against national security” and “moharebeh” through membership in the Hayat Party. Azad Kurdistan (PJAK) was sentenced to death. The sentence was commuted to life imprisonment with a reduced sentence after it was upheld by an appeals court in 2011, after which Zeinab was transferred to Khoy Prison in West Azerbaijan Province. During his years in prison, he contracted a number of diseases, including blurred vision, pterygium, thrush and asthma.

Zeinab Jalalian has been deported to various prisons in Iran four times over the past year. . He only has the right to contact his parents by phone from time to time, even in Persian, and very briefly, and he is also denied access.

However, during his 14 years of imprisonment in the harsh conditions of different prisons in the country, he has contracted various diseases and is in an unsuitable physical condition due to deprivation of medical services.

In 2016, the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention requested the Islamic Republic of Iran to release Zeinab Jalalian immediately and to take all necessary measures to compensate the damages imposed on her without delay and in accordance with international standards. According to the international working group, Zeinab Jalalian’s deprivation of liberty was arbitrary and in violation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.

A number of political and civil activists and human rights defenders launched a campaign called “Where is Zainab?”.

  I say with them in unison, “Where is Zainab?”

  I hope that international human rights organizations and women and prisoners’ rights activists will increase their pressure on the Iranian regime in this regard.