Over 2,300 lecturers and residents in Iran have expressed concern for the well-being of two lecturers at the moment held in Adelabad Prison in Shiraz.
Iraj Rahnama and Gholamreza Gholami, serving as lecturers in Fars Province, have launched into a starvation strike since January 13 to protest the sentences handed right down to them.
They had been sentenced to 5 and eleven years in jail, respectively, by Branch 37 of the Fars Province Appeals Court in December.
In addition to their jail phrases, they obtained “supplementary penalties,” together with a two-year journey ban leading to passport cancellation and a two-year ban on on-line actions.
Furthermore, Gholami has been subjected to a further penalty of two years of exile in Birjand, northeast of Iran.
The assertion stated, “The bodily and age-related circumstances of the 2 prisoners, mixed with the substantial and irreversible dangers of their starvation strike, have deeply nervous their households, fellow activists, and the whole group.”
In latest a long time, quite a few political prisoners in Iran, particularly these enterprise starvation strikes in protest, have confronted varied well being points and critical accidents, with some shedding their lives.
While the federal government’s longstanding historical past of strain and efforts to suppress lecturers and activists persist over the previous twenty years, latest years have witnessed a major surge within the detention of lecturers and the imposition of extreme jail sentences upon them.
For years, Iranian educators have been advocating for elevated salaries and pensions, being among the many lowest-paid segments of presidency workers. Additionally, they’ve voiced their opposition to the poisoning of schoolgirls, a disaster that emerged in Iran final yr, impacting quite a few instructional establishments and affecting hundreds of scholars.