Iranian Activist Arrested Again

Fatemeh Shams and Mohammad Reza Jalaeipour.

As our Summer issue is on its way to subscribers and newsstands comes troubling news that the husband of one of our contributors has been arrested again by Iranian security forces.

Oxford PhD student Mohammad Reza Jalaeipour, who campaigned for opposition leader Mir Hussein Moussavi in 2009, was arrested on Monday afternoon, June 14, according to his wife, Fatemeh Shams.

Jalaeipour was first arrested on June 17, 2009. After attending a family wedding in Iran, Jalaeipour was prevented from boarding a flight to Dubai. He and his wife had been returning to the UK to continue their studies. The couple were members of the Third Wave campaign, a reformist youth movement that eventually backed Moussavi in the Iranian presidential election last year. Jalaeipour told the Wall Street Journal that, inspired by the Obama campaign,he had created pages on Facebook to reach young Iranian voters. After his 2009 arrest, Jalaeipour endured eighty days of imprisonment including more than fifty days in solitary confinement at the notorious Evin Prison in Tehran. After his release, Jalaeipour remained in Iran with his parents, as his passport had been confiscated. His wife currently lives in the UK where she also attends Oxford.

According to Shams, Jalaeipour was told by authorities on Monday that he should go to a local mosque to finally receive his passport. Instead, Jalaeipour came home from the mosque with five plainclothes agents and then was taken away to Evin Prison. Shams says the reasons for her husband’s rearrest have not been made clear. Before Monday’s events, Iran’s judiciary had reportedly declared his case closed.

Tomorrow is the anniversary of Jalaeipour’s original arrest. Jalaeipour and his wife have now been separated for a year. VQR’s Summer issue features a special symposium on Iranian writers, including letters written by Shams to her husband while he was first held in prison. These letters are a heartbreaking portrait to the human side of the struggle in Iran. One year after the Iranian election and the birth of the Green Movement, Jalaeipour’s latest arrest makes it clear that the struggle is far from over.

CNN video of an interview of Shams last June: