Kurdistan Human Rights Network

Zeynab Jalalian, Iran's longest-serving and only female political prisoner serving a life sentence, has written a letter from Yazd prison, urging the Iranian people to abstain from voting in the upcoming elections. In a poignant message, Jalalian urged Iranians to keep the ballot boxes empty, emphasising the personal sacrifice she has made for the cause of freedom. "I remain behind bars for your sake," she...

Zeynab Jalalian, Iran's longest-serving and only female political prisoner serving a life sentence in Yazd prison, marked her seventeenth year in prison yesterday. Throughout her imprisonment, Jalalian has been denied the right to furlough and has been illegally transferred several times to different prisons across the country. Born in 1982 in the border village of Dim Qeshlaq in Maku, West Azerbaijan Province, Jalalian moved to...

Zeynab Jalalian, a Kurdish political prisoner serving a life sentence, is facing deteriorating health conditions in her sixteenth year in Yazd Central Prison. Despite suffering from pterygium, foot-and-mouth disease (FMD), impaired vision, asthma, kidney and digestive problems, Jalalian has been denied medical treatment due to opposition from the Ministry of Intelligence. Recently, Jalalian was interrogated by a Ministry of Intelligence team, restrained with handcuffs and...

Zeynab Jalalian, Iran's only woman political prisoner serving a life sentence, has been threatened and coerced into making forced confessions and expressing remorse by interrogators from the Ministry of Intelligence. Over the past few months, a team of interrogators from the Ministry of Intelligence has met with Jalalian several times in Yazd Central Prison, telling her that her freedom or access to medical care depends...

Kurdish political prisoner Zeynab Jalalian is spending her 16th Newroz (also Nowruz in Persian) behind the bars in Yazd Prison. Jalalian is the only woman political prisoner with a life sentence in Iran. In addition to the numerous tortures she has endured over the years, the political prisoner has been denied the right to temporary leave even for medical treatment. Since her arrest in Kermanshah, western Iran,...

Kurdish woman political prisoner Zeynab Jalalian, who has entered the 15th year of her imprisonment in Iran, had previously published an open letter to the public announcing that she had been denied access to medical care. On 10 November 2021, Jalalian was transferred from the Juvenile Detention Centre of Kermanshah to Yazd Central Prison and has been denied the right to receive visits by her...

Iranian security forces detained the mother of Kurdish woman political prisoner Zeynab Jalalian at her home in Maku, West Azerbaijan province, for several hours on 21 February. The Ministry of Intelligence in Maku interrogated and threatened Gozal Hajizadeh over her statements calling on the international community to pressure Iran to release her daughter. Hajizadeh was released after several hours. On 20 February, a video of Hajizadeh, in...

Kurdish woman political prisoner Zeynab Jalalian, who is sentenced to life imprisonment and is serving her 14th year in prison in Yazd, is in critical condition due to being denied access to medical treatment. A source close to Jalalian spoke to the Kurdistan Human Rights Network (KHRN) about her latest situation and said: “After contracting Covid-19, Zeynab was in a bad physical condition and suffered...