Iran International
Amnesty International has slammed Iran for prisoner deaths resulting from deliberate denial of medical care, turning prisons into "waiting rooms for death".
In a new report, the global rights organization has documented how prison authorities routinely cause or contribute to deaths in custody, including by blocking or delaying prisoners’ access to emergency hospitalization. The 180-page briefing published on April 12 is based on reviewing ninety-six cases of death in custody in thirty prisons across Iran in the past twelve years.
In many cases, including the case of Nader Alizehi in Zahedan in 2017, prison authorities and its medical staff accused prisoners of "faking" or "exaggerating" their illness. When Alizehi sought medical care, he was sent away by prison clinic staff with gastrointestinal medication and died at the age of twenty-two in prison due to a heart condition.
Another young man, Abdolvahed Gomshadzehi, died in the same prison in Zahedan after prison officials refused to hospitalize him despite prison doctors' warning. The cause of the nineteen-year-old Gomshadzehi's death was neglected blood clots in his brain which he had sustained because of beatings during his arrest and interrogations two years earlier.
Like Gomshadzehi, at least eleven other prisoners out of the ninety-six, died after being denied medical care for injuries resulting from incidents that occurred at the time of their arrest or while they were in prison. The death of the remaining eighty-five resulted from heart attacks and strokes, gastrointestinal complications, respiratory complications, kidney problems, Covid-19 or other infectious diseases for which they had not received the required care.
“Deaths in custody resulting from the deliberate denial of healthcare amount to arbitrary deprivation of life, which is a serious human rights violation under international law," said Diana Eltahawy, deputy regional director for the Middle East and North Africa at Amnesty International who called the authorities' disregard for human life "chilling".
Denial of medical care affects ordinary prisoners as well as political prisoners and prisoners of conscience. In January, Iranian writer Baktash Abtin died of Covid-19 complications after he was denied timely treatment at Tehran’s notorious Evin prison. The Iranian Writers' Association alleged that Abtin’s condition was the direct result of “deliberate delay” to start his treatment.
Abtin was serving a six-year sentence for "propaganda against the state" and “assembly and collusion against national security”, two of the vaguely defined charges categorically brought against political dissidents.
In February 2021, another prisoner of conscience, Behnam Mahjoubi, aged thirty-three died in hospital after falling into a coma. Mahjoubi who was imprisoned for participating at a protest rally alleged he had suffered brutal torture in a psychiatric hospital during his imprisonment.
Out of the ninety-six prisoners whose deaths in custody were reviewed by Amnesty International, twenty-three were between 19 and 39 years of age, and twenty-six of them were between forty and fifty-nine.
Sixty-four of all these prisoners died inside their prison cells meaning they were not given even basic medical supervision in their final hours. Some died while in poorly equipped prison clinics, and at least 26 prisoners died during transfer or shortly after admission to hospital, following deliberate delays by prison medical staff and/or prison officials.
In at least six cases, critically ill prisoners were moved to solitary confinement, punishment wards or quarantine sections - four of these died alone in prison while two were eventually authorized for hospital transfers, but it proved too late, Amnesty said.
"Dust storms will definitely recur in the coming months, and more frequently if we can't solve the problem through diplomacy and international relations with countries such as Saudi Arabia and Iraq where dusts originate from," Karim Hassani, member of parliament from Ahvaz in the southwestern province of Khuzestan, said.
Hassani urged the government of President Ebrahim Raisi to form a joint committee with regional countries as well as international bodies including the World Health Organization (WHO) to find ways to mitigate the problem.
Long-term measures to reduce dust storms include management of water resources and planting drought-resistant trees in deserts to hold down sands. Iran has for years used different methods to stabilize sand dunes with vegetation restoration, but not sufficiently.
Saudi Arabia and other regional countries also aim to plant billions of drought-resistant trees in the coming decades to reduce carbon emissions, pollution and land degradation.
Since mid-March, massive dust storms have hit various parts of the country, including the capital Tehran. Dust and sand originate both within Iran and in neighboring countries. Dust storms have caused a health crisis in recent days and forced the government to shut down schools and government offices in some cities and cancel outdoor sporting events. Officials warned of another wave hitting on Tuesday and Wednesday.
The capital Tehran was logged as the most polluted city in the world on Friday with air quality hazardous and visibility very low largely due to the very high level of airborne particles.
Dust storms and other pollutants have increased markedly in recent years in several Iranian provinces, including Khuzestan, Kermanshah, and Sistan-Baluchestan.
Although air quality in Tehran is generally bad due to the huge number of inefficient vehicles, industries, and the city's position at the foot of mountains that trap pollution, recent levels of pollution are unprecedented.
Municipality and health ministry officials have attributed the very high level of pollution in Tehran and other cities including the west and southwest of the country in recent days to dust coming from neighboring Iraq.
Sand and dust storms affect much of North Africa and countries in the Middle East. While many sandstorms have natural causes, environmentalists blame anthropogenic factors such as building dams on rivers and drying of marshes and wetlands for desertification of vast areas.
In Iran's southwestern Khuzestan Province, for instance, the building of Gotvand dam on the Karoun river to support industries such as steel in other provinces and drying ancient marshes and lagoons to dig for oil have created vast sources of anthropogenic dust storms.
But Khuzestan is not the only place in Iran where mismanagement of water resources has created potential sources of dust storms. Lake Urmia (Urumieh), once a navigable lake in northwestern Iran, has shrunk to half its size in the past four decades due to allocation of water from rivers that fed it to agriculture.
In some cases, the building of dams hundreds of miles away in other countries can create potential sources of dust that affect Iran. Building of dams in Turkey, for instance, has caused loss of vegetation in Iraq.
Building of the Kamal Khan Dam in Afghanistan has also led to the drying of Hirmand (Helmand in Afghanistan) river, which flows into Iran's Sistan and Baluchestan Province feeding the Hamoun lake and its once green surroundings.