About us
The Kurdistan Human Rights Network is an independent, non-profit, and nonpartisan organisation registered in France since 2014.
The activities of this organisation focus on the two areas of education and promotion of human rights principles and values, as well as reporting and documenting human rights violations in Kurdistan/Iran.
Our activities also consist of raising public awareness and informing the media, as well as international human rights institutions and organisations. In this regard, the website and official social media accounts and channels of the Kurdistan Human Rights Network are active in three languages: Kurdish, Persian, and English.
The Kurdistan Human Rights Network has been a member of the World Coalition Against the Death Penalty since 2017. It also has close ties and bilateral cooperation with Kurdish, Iranian, and international human rights organisations.
Directors & Boards:
Fatemeh Karimi
Member of the Board of Directors
Academic and author, whose research and books explore gender relations in Iranian Kurdish society and political groups. She holds a PhD in sociology from the Paris School of Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences. She has a master’s degree in Women Studies from Tehran’s Allameh Tabatabai University.
Her 2010 book “Tragedy of the Body” investigates the impact of female genital mutilation among Kurdish women and the wider society. It was selected book of the year in Tehran by the Sediqeh Dowlatabadi Library. Her other book published in 2014 examines the sociological and psychological repercussion of polygamy.
Rebin Rahmani
Member of the Board of Directors
Joined the student movement when he was a student of computer engineering at the University of Birjand and at the Iran University of Science and Technology in Arak. He was on the editorial board of the Kurdish student magazine Rojhelat. He was arrested in 2006 for political activities, and served two years in prison. He fled Iran the following year due to continued pressure and threats from the security forces.
It was the experiences of his pre-trial detention, interrogation and prison life that inspired him to enter the world of human rights activism, to promote human rights and defend the rights of prisoners. He lives in Paris and previously worked with various Iranian rights activists and organizations, including Human Rights Documentation Centre and the International Campaign for Human Rights in Iran.
Kaveh Kermanshahi
Member of the Board of Directors
His decades of activism and research have focused on minorities, gender equality and the rights of the LGBTIQ community. Prior to his postgraduate studies in social work and human rights at Berlin’s Alice Salomon University of Applied Sciences, he obtained a diploma in conflict process and transcultural studies from the European Institute for Conflict-Culture-Cooperation. In 2011 he was awarded the Human Rights Watch grant Hellman/Hammett.
He has a Law degree from Iran’s Islamic Azad University of Kermanshah. He fled Iran in 2010, a year after he was detained for months and later sentenced to four years in jail for his activism. He was released on bail and left the country immidiately after he was made aware a final verdict on his appeal had upheld the sentence.
Leyli Hassanpour
Member of the Board of Directors
In 2011 she engaged in environmental activism in Iran’s Kurdish Marivan, a border town known as a hub of mountaineers and green campaigners. She was a member of the Mairvan Cultural-Literary Association before she moved on to journalism and worked as a reporter for several publications in neighbouring Iraqi Kurdistan, mostly covering human rights. She campaigned for detained activists and political prisoners to have legal representation. She lives in Oslo where she is learning about primary teaching approaches in the Norwegian education sector.