Petition to Lift House Arrest of Green Movement Leaders Gains Signatures

A petition addressed to Hassan Rouhani, president of Iranian and head of its Supreme Security Council, requesting the release of Mir Hossein Mousavi, Mehdi Karroubi, and Zahra Rahnavard from house arrest has gathered more than 13,000 signatures since its online publication on February 12.

The petition, prepared on the threshold of the third anniversary of the house arrests, is still gathering signatures despite the fact that pro– Mousavi and Karroubi websites have been blocked on the Internet in Iran. In addition to hundreds of Iranian citizens, activists, and prominent reformists, the letter has been signed by a group of Grand Ayatollahs, clerics, and Qom Seminary students.

The letter notes Rouhani’s campaign pledge to guarantee the rights of citizens and asks him to deliver on his promise of lifting the three-year-long house arrests of Zahra Rahnavard, Mir Hossein Mousavi, and Mehdi Karroubi as soon as possible. “We believe the continuation of this unfair trend is against national interests at a time when people have placed a lot of hope in your administration, [finding it] not only incompatible with wisdom, but destructive to hope,” says the letter, referring to Rouhani’s election campaign slogan, “government of wisdom and hope.”

Mir Hossein Mousavi, former Prime Minister, and Mehdi Karroubi, former Speaker of Iran’s parliament, were presidential candidates in the 2009 election in which the incumbent President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was declared the winner in disputed circumstances. The announcement of his victory set off huge protests in Tehran and other cities, which the authorities violently suppressed, followed by arrests and show trials of journalists, government critics, and opposition activists linked to the campaigns of Mousavi and Karroubi.

After the election, authorities tightly monitored and controlled the movements of Karroubi, Mousavi, and their wives, and suspended the presidential candidates’ newspapers Etemad-e Melli and Kalameyeh Sabz. In mid-February 2011, in the wake of their joint appeal for Iranians to demonstrate in support of pro-reform protests in Egypt and Tunisia, the men and their wives were placed under house arrest without court orders. Fatemeh Karroubi was later released but Mehdi Karroubi, Mousavi, and Rahnavard have remained under house arrest with limited access to their families and deprived of due process.