A/HRC/25/61
threatened to bring in his family in to beat them up and well. After 91 days at the
Intelligence Center, he was transferred to the Sanandaj prison. During this time, he
encountered Ebrahim Lotfullahi, the Kurdish student activist who later died under
mysterious circumstance in detention.
Fatemeh Goftari
Mother’s for Peace / Kurdish rights activist
Ms. Goftari left Iran four years ago. She is the mother of Amir and Yaser Goli.
By 2006, one of her sons had fled, one was in prison, and her husband was also in prison,
“so they took me to prison as well.”
When her son Yaser had been arrested (in 2006), prison officials called her to ask her to
come get his possessions. He was to pay his university tuition that day, so he had quite a bit
of tuition money on him. She told them that her husband would come, but they said no, she
should come. They told her not to be scared, that she should come to a kiosk and it would
only take two minutes. She decided she would not go alone, so she took her other son Amir.
They were not far from the prison when a car pulled up, and she was worried that they were
there to arrest her son. But they grabbed her neck and tried to arrest her. She told him:
“Don’t worry, take my bag, I will flee from the other side of the car.” But there was
someone blocking the way. They treated her harshly and brought her to the Intelligence
Center. There, she saw Habibollah Latifi, who was a friend of her son, so she said hello.
They banged his head against the wall until he bled. From then on, they were fixated on her
connection with him, although, as she kept telling them, she only knew him because he was
a friend of her son. They kept her in the Detention Center for eight days and then moved
her to a prison. She still had not been presented with charges. She was now in a cell with 50
other women.
One morning in the prison she woke up because she heard terrible crying. She asked two
other women what was going on, and they explained that someone was going to be
executed. They took her to a bathroom, where they looked through ventilation hole. From
there, they could see the hanging rope. The person who was going to be hanged was crying.
They would also threaten her often. They did not beat her body, but did slap her face.
After she saw the rope, she decided, along with those two women, that she would embark
on a hunger strike. This lasted five days, during which she developed a stomach ulcer. So
she and the other women stopped. Three days after this hunger strike, she was taken to a
Revolutionary Court. Her trial was five minutes long. At the court, her judge told her: “You
are a trouble-maker. Wherever you go, you make trouble.” The court demanded five millon
tuman bail.
She was sentenced to three years for attacking the Government, in the sense that she had
insulted them verbally, which was “true, given the fact that her sons were in prison.”
Another charge was signing the One Million Signatures Campaign, and a third for working
with Mothers for Peace. She did not have access to a lawyer during the trial, and later she
had trouble finding one who would take her case. But later she did find one, and he got the
sentence reduced to two years. To this day she has no idea why she was targeted
(specifically), although she is fairly sure it’s because of her family’s convictions and
because as a member of the Mothers for Peace, they would mourn the deaths of all victims
of the Government, including members of the political and other groups, without
discrimination.
Early one the morning in Sanandaj, two months after her release from prison, she went to
buy bread. Since she had already been to prison, she had a “sort of sixth-sense,” and
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