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Statement of Kurdish Human Rights Advocacy
Group on Mr. Kaboudvand's hunger strike
29.7.2012
By Amir Sharif, Press Release via Ekurd.net |
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Jailed Iranian Kurdish human rights activist
Mohammad Sadiq Kaboudvand,
currently in Iranian prison serving an 11-year
sentence. Kabudvand is being held in Tehran’s Evin
Prison. •
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July
29, 2012
Kurdish Human Rights Advocacy Group joins the
Campaign of Supporting Kaboodvand to express its
solidarity with Mr. Kaboodvand, a Kurdish political
prisoner who is on hunger strike to express his
protest to his plight and the deplorable condition
in which all political prisoners find themselves in
Iran. Mr.Kaboodvand occupies a distinct place of
honor in the annals of human rights activism as a
founder of a Kurdish human rights organization,
sentenced to over a decade of imprisonment for his
engagement with human rights and ethnic and
religious discriminations. His latest courageous act
belies the fact he is putting his precarious yet
dynamic life in greater danger to protest the
inhumane conditions and treatments to which
political prisoners are subjected under Islamic
Republic of Iran. Hunger strike remains the last
form of expressive political protest under
autocratic regimes. Mr.Kaboodvand’s hunger strike is
more a testimony to his living will than his desire
to die.
The plight of Mr.Kaboodvand is revealing as he is
pleading the international community to see his
frail, starved and inscribed body as the last
testimony, as a mark of visibility denied. This
expressive protest as his last resort retells the
tragic yet selfless drama that unfolds in the
prisons of Islamic Republic every day against the
blight and the plight caused by the theocratic
regime. His struggle reminds us of hunger strikes
launched by prominent figures such as Mahatma Gandhi
and Nelson Mandela, and Bobby Sands who awakened the
world to crucial issues of human rights, social
injustice, and political repression of their times.
Although deprived of every right and rendered
powerless, Mr. Kaboodvand shows that in the absence
of legislative and constitutional rights, he is
using hunger strike to symbolize his universal
outcry for moral and humanitarian values and
justice.
While we support Mr. Kaboodvand in his fearless,
heroic and persistent struggle for freedom, we are
concerned about his life. The international
community is now absorbed and ensnared in the
nuclear weapons rhetoric, thus losing sight of the
urgency and gravity of human rights in Iran .It is
time that human rights organizations again confront
the Islamic Republic on the issue of human rights
more aggressively. Mr.Kaboodvand is in a precarious
situation; it is imperative that the U.N.,
particularly the Human Rights Commission make
effective use of its offices on behalf of Mr.
Kaboodvand to address and redress his demands
including his request for the right to visitation by
his family,www.ekurd.net
particularly his terminally ill son. We call on the
United Nations to assign a UN rapporteur to prepare
an onsite report on the torturing condition of
prisons and plight of political prisoners such as
Mr. Kaboodvand so that greater pressure is exerted
on the Islamic Republic to halt its exterminating
campaign against human rights activists and releases
political prisoners as human rights organizations
and individuals continue to illuminate the path to
the realization of fundamental rights and freedoms
in Iran.
July 21, 2012
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