Civil Society

February 7, 2012
February 7, 2012
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Egypt — Punishing Pro-Democracy NGOs

Arseh Sevom --- The Egyptian public prosecutor has issued more than 40 indictments against members of international NGOs for participating in banned activities and receiving funding from foreign sources. The Arabist has published a list of names and affiliations. Nineteen of those indicted are American citizens.The Guardian reports that NGOs attempting to legally register in Egypt face a long wait and confusing bureaucracy:
"You submit your papers, then they keep asking for more and you don't get anywhere, and in the end you are not registered," said Sherif Azer, deputy head of the Egyptian Organisation for Human Rights.NDI [National Democratic Institute] submitted a request in 2005 that did not meet with much interest by the authorities and was asked to resubmit its papers by the ministry of foreign affairs last month, Hughes said. "We were given verbal indications that our programmes were well within Egyptian law," she said.
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February 6, 2012
February 6, 2012
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Families of BBC Reporters in Iran Targeted

Arseh Sevom --- For months now, Iranian state media has been slandering BBC Persian journalists, accusing them of a number of crimes including drug trafficking, sexual impropriety, and even rape. Recently, they also began detaining the family members of the journalists for questioning in the hopes of intimidating the foreign-based journalists.“This is unprecedented in its level of viscousness,” BBC correspondent Kasra Naji tells Arseh Sevom. "We have not seen this level of brazen and vicious attacks before.""It is impossible to miss the pattern of arrests and intimidation from the regime against those who challenge the dominance of its hold on information," says Arseh Sevom board president, Bert Taken. "We saw a sharp rise in arrests before the 2009 elections as well. This was particularly the case with women's rights activists, reporters, and bloggers. The harassment of the families of human rights defenders, journalists, and others is a new low for Iran. We know the mother of an imprisoned human rights defender was imprisoned simply for speaking with the international media. Arseh Sevom asks the Iranian government to rescind these policies and to respect its citizen's freedom of speech as guaranteed by its own constitution."
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February 2, 2012
February 2, 2012
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EU High Representative Voices Concern About the Treatment of Journalists and Netizens in Iran

On January 31, 2012, The High Representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy and Vice-President of the Commission, Catherine Ashton, issued a statement of concerned about the state of journalists and netizens in Iran. She calls for Iran to review harsh sentences and for a moratorium on the death penalty. The text of the statement follows:
"I am extremely worried about the growing harassment and persecution of journalists and internet bloggers in Iran. The right to free speech is an internationally enshrined fundamental human right, which Iran itself has freely signed up to respect and protect. In the past few weeks, security forces have reportedly arrested many journalists, including Sahameddin Bourghani, Parastoo Dokouhaki, Hassan Fathi, Farshad Ghorbanpour, Ehsan Houshmand, Fatemeh Kheradmand, Saeed Madani, Shahram Manouchehri, Marzieh Rasouli, Arash Sadeghi and Mohammad Soleimani Nia. I call on the Iranian authorities to release these journalists and restore their rights to freely communicate their views.
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January 30, 2012
January 30, 2012
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Iran — Shocking Escalation of Arrests and Human Rights Violations

Arseh Sevom- The end of January 2012 witnessed a further escalation in human rights violations in Iran. The ongoing repression continued with the arrest of two journalists, both women: Parastoo Dokoohaki and Marzieh Rasooli. The arrests of Mohammad Solimaninya, a website administrator and owner of Social Network for Iranian Professionals (www.u24.ir) that hosts and designs a number of civil society websites, ten Sunni Muslims in Ahwaz, as well as the shocking confirmation of the death sentence for Iranian-Canadian Saeed Malekopour, are just a few examples of the human rights situation in Iran in January alone.
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January 5, 2012
January 5, 2012
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How do you sanitize the Internet?

Board member Fred Petrossians, writing for Global Voices discusses rumors and plans for total control of the internet by the Iranian state:
Iranian authorities see the internet as a real battleground and consider citizen media and social networking as tools of “soft war”. Over several years they claim to have blocked and filtered millions of websites and blogs. Now several bloggers have reported that Iran's Corporate Computer Systems say the goal is for Iran to be entirely cut off from the World Wide Web once the country launches its own national internet network.
(More here...)
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December 15, 2011
December 15, 2011
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Protest and Advocacy on Arseh Sevom

Arseh Sevom -- With the announcement from Time Magazine that The Protester is this year's person of the year, we thought this was a good time to remind our readers of all the great content on Arseh Sevom's English site related to protests, demonstrations, and acts of advocacy.The entire Arseh Sevom Zine for Winter 2011 responds to the question: "What's next? What comes after the unity when the messy business of democracy begins?" A good place to start is with The Letter from the Editor, which sets the stage for the rest of the articles.The first issue of Arseh Sevom's Civil Society Zine looks at networking, networks, and change. You might want to check out Linda Herrera's piece: Two Faces of Revolution: Why Dictators Fear the Internet.In Creating the Impossible: The Invisible Network of Britain's Activist Subculture, Avery Oslo discusses the consensus building of eco-activists. Some of it may sound familiar to people who have been following the activities of Occupy Wall Street.
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December 15, 2011
December 15, 2011
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The Protester, Time’s 2011 Person of the Year

Arseh Sevom -- In 2009, hundreds of thousands, maybe millions, of Iranians took to the streets to express their desire for more open and democratic governance. Most were wary of revolutionary promises and seeking reform with space to participate in society.“I stood on the streets with women in chadors who were protesting for my right not to wear a veil,” a 29-year-old school teacher in Tehran told us. “It surprised me.”That year many people urged Time Magazine to consider the protesters in Iran as the person of the year. They were disappointed by the choice of Ben Bernanke This year Time Magazine focused on The Protester, which professor and activist, Michael Benton calls, “Protest the way the American media establishment wants it -- faceless and ambiguous. Note that last month's time covers in the USA were different from the rest of the world's -- asking Americans to be ‘OK’ with ‘anxiety.’”  Scott Lucas of Enduring America tells Arseh Sevom, “"It is not just The Protester as the Person of the Year. It is the resurrection of belief in protest as a positive, a belief that rights, justice, and a better way of life are not simply to be held and withheld by those who claim to be leaders."
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December 2, 2011
December 2, 2011
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From the Zine: Tips from Peace-Worker Jasmin Nordien

Arseh Sevom -- Arseh Sevom spoke with South African activist Jasmin Nordien about her experiences working in civil society organizations in South Africa. In a post published in the Civil Society Zine, we focus on her experiences throughout the 1990s, when she worked with the Network of Independent Monitors (NIM) reporting on state violence and supporting individuals and grassroots organizations. Jasmin shares some of the lessons she learned about the importance of creating networked organizations, the differences between leadership and management, and the need for clarity of purpose. Jasmin tells us, “...I no longer wanted to monitor the society I did not want to live in. I wanted to build the kind of society that my children and grandchildren would group up in.”
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November 22, 2011
November 22, 2011
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UN Calls for Access for Special Rapporteur on Human Rights in Iran

Originally published by United4Iran. The UN General Assembly’s Third Committee today adopted a resolution (PDF) calling on the Iranian Government to allow unfettered access to the country by the UN Special Rapporteur on the human rights situation in Iran, Dr. Ahmed Shaheed, to investigate violations taking place in the country. The resolution also calls on Iran to release all arbitrarily detained individuals held for exercising their right to peaceful assembly and expression, including leading opposition figures, Mir Hossein Mousavi and Mehdi Karroubi.
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