Some four members of the Kurdistan-Divandarreh Teachers’ Union, named Omid Shah-Mohammadi, Parviz Ahsani, Kaveh Mohammadzadeh, and Hiva Ghoreishi, are still held in the detention centre of the Ministry of Intelligence in Sanandaj, Kurdistan province.
They are denied the right to have a lawyer or receive family visits.
Security forces arrested these teachers on 15 June during a protest rally of teachers in front of the Ministry of Education in Sanandaj.
On 18 July, the Kurdistan-Divandarreh Teachers’ Union published a statement, announcing the continued arrest of these teachers.
“The honourable teachers of Divandarreh, Parviz Ahsani, Hiva Ghoreishi, Kaveh Mohammadzadeh, and Omid Shah-Mohammadi, have been imprisoned for their trade union activities. After a month has passed, no convincing answer has been given by the judicial and security system to their families and colleagues”, the statement said.
The final part of the statement read: “In this way, we ask the judicial and security apparatus to release our colleagues and not to put the families and society of the teachers in trouble anymore and to keep the window of interaction open. Otherwise, the educators and the families of the imprisoned colleagues will not remain silent and will use all their rational and lawful power to free these beloved ones. And if the detention of colleagues continues, we will have no choice but to call for a gathering and a sit-in until the result is achieved. We insistently want the judicial system to behave in a fair and just manner so that people’s hopes for the implementation of justice will not be harmed. We warn you, if our voices are not heard again and we are kept behind closed doors with empty promises, the teachers of this city will have no choice but to protest and take on the streets in response to the illegal actions. And without a doubt, friends, relatives, and even Iranian teachers will also join in this path. We will rely on this decision until the result is reached.”
After their arrests, the four teachers’ union activists were taken to the detention centre of the intelligence ministry in Sanandaj.
During this period, they have only made several short phone calls to their families.
In the past month, despite the follow-ups by the families of these activists in the court and security institutions, as well as their gatherings in front of the city court, no clear answer has been given to the families and colleagues of the detainees regarding the reason for their arrests and their conditions.
