IRGC and Prosecutor’s Office Delay Prisoner’s Hospitalization

International Campaign for Human Rights in Iran

The IRGC and the Tehran Prosecutor have postponed transferring prisoner of conscience Feizollah Arabsorkhi to the hospital for months, his wife told International Campaign for Human Rights in Iran. He is in dire health, and has received official approval to go to the hospital, but officials continue to delay the transfer.

“My husband needs urgent shoulder surgery and his spinal disc problem has worsened. The doctors related to the IRGC and the prison, as well as the Medical Examiner, have confirmed that he must be transferred to a hospital as soon as possible, but for unknown reasons, the IRGC and the Prosecutor’s Office keep passing the responsibility for his transfer to each other. I waited several months for him to be transferred to the hospital through the legal process, but I grew tired [of waiting] and I want the whole world to know about this,” Maryam Sharbatdar Ghods told the Campaign.

“Every time we go to see him, we watch him suffer in pain. When I saw his miserable condition yesterday I was so upset I decided to talk about it. We have been pursuing his hospitalization since before March, and the authorities keep promising to transfer him, but they don’t do it. Even the Prosecutor’s Office sent several hospital transfer authorization letters for him to the Prison, but they didn’t transfer him. When we followed up again, they told us implicitly that the IRGC authorities would not allow it. They keep bouncing us among the IRGC, the Prosecutor’s Office, and the Prison officials,” said Maryam Sharbatdar Ghods about her last visitation with her husband on Monday, July 22.

Feizollah Arabsorkhi, a reformist political activist, was a member of the Islamic Revolution Mujahedin Organization and a former Deputy Minister of Commerce in Mohammad Khatami’s cabinet. Arabsorkhi was arrested on July 7, 2009, during the post-election crackdown, and was sentenced to six years in prison. In the fall of 2012, after a deterioration in his health, Arabsorkhi was sent to Baghiatallah Hospital, where he remained under treatment for four months. After his transfer back to prison, his health has been deteriorating again.

“We expected a change in behaviors and policies after the [recent] election, but unfortunately, nothing has happened. I wish they had used the atmosphere that emerged during election days and generated new hopes, and showed that they, too, would like to take steps towards national peace-making by releasing these productive forces instead of keeping them in prison while allowing the nation’s plunderers to walk comfortably and freely in society,” Sharbatdar Ghods told the Campaign.

Referring to a recent incident in which 150 members of the Prison Special Forces stormed Evin Prison’s Ward 350, the political prisoners’ ward, on July 19, Sharbatdar Ghods said, “Instead of improvements in the situation, it appears that things are getting worse. Last week’s attack by the Prison Special Guards on Ward 350 was truly unprecedented. During visitation on Monday, the prisoners were saying that many of their personal belongings went missing during the attack. They said that 150 security forces attacked the ward and afterwards it appeared as if they had rototilled the ward, turning it upside down. We don’t understand what the captured and the imprisoned could have done to be perceived as dangerous enough to be attacked by 150 forces!”