Letter Requesting Intervention on Reza Khandan’s Arrest

SUMMARY

Through our Task Force on the Independence of Lawyers and Judges, the City Bar joined a letter from the Coalition for the Endangered Lawyer to the UN Special Rapporteur on the independence of judges and lawyers (among others) urging immediate intervention on behalf of Reza Khandan, a human rights activist in Iran. Khandan is married to Nasrin Sotoudeh, a prominent human rights and women’s rights activist who has been outspoken against the mandatory hijab laws. In apparent retaliation for his wife’s continued activism on behalf of women’s rights, Khandan has been summoned to prison – purportedly to serve a sentence related to his human rights activism that authorities have, until now, expressed no interest in enforcing. The letter urges Iranian authorities to rescind the summons, drop all charges against Reza Khandan and Nasrin Sotoudeh, and to “stop persecuting them for their efforts to protect, inter alia, women from discrimination and humiliation to which they are subjected in contravention of the principle of civilisation enshrined in Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, ratified by Iran in 1948, according to which ‘all human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights.’”