Reports from inside Iran’s Semnan prison indicate that political prisoner Maryam Akbari Monfared health is deteriorating day by day. According to the order of the regime’s ministry of intelligence, to increase the pressure on Monfared, prison officials are refusing to send her to the hospital for medical care.
For the past 11 months, Monfared has been suffering from liver disease. Due to her condition, the prison’s doctor prescribed her to only consume food specialized for patients with liver disease. However, until now the regime’s officials have not allowed her to obtain the prescribed food.
As a result, most of the time she has been forced to consume bread and cheese. Even her requests to buy food from the prison’s shop have been denied, worsening her condition as her liver has reached a dangerous state. Despite the many follow-ups of her family to transfer her to the Evin prison, the officials have not responded. Monfared was suddenly exiled to Semnan prison on March 10, 2021.
The regime’s judiciary has not responded to the follow-ups, and none of the judiciary’s institutions have accepted responsibility for her exile or given any reasonable response regarding the decision to exile her.
Mrs. Monfared is currently serving a 13-year prison sentence. Over these years, she has been repeatedly deprived of the minimum rights of a prisoner, even those included in the regime’s law. This is because the regime has constantly denied having any political prisoners, instead referring to them as security prisoners.
Monfared was initially arrested on December 31, 2009, following the fierce protests of 2009 in Tehran. This was because she fought to expose the regime’s crimes in the massacres in 1980 and 1988, and sought justice for the executed political prisoners while continuing to support the people’s ongoing protests.
At that time, the regime accused her of making phone calls and meeting her relatives, who are members of the People’s Mojahedin Organization of Iran (PMOI/MEK). At the time of her arrest, the MEK members were stationed in Iraq in Camp Ashraf.
In June of the following year, Monfared was sentenced by Branch 15 of the Revolutionary Court of Tehran, headed by notorious judge Abolghasem Salavati, who was responsible for many death sentences, to 15 years in prison.
Over the years, the regime has executed four of her siblings. Two of her brothers were executed in the 1980s at a very young age on charges of having links and being members of the MEK. Another younger brother and a sister were executed in the summer of 1988 in the massacre of 30,000 political prisoners. The regime’s judiciary announced that the crime of her younger brother was selling Mojahed publications. As a youngster, Monfared was forced to spend her childhood visiting family members in the regime’s prisons and cemeteries.
In October 2016, she took the daring step of filing an official complaint with the Prosecutor General of Tehran over the executions of her brother and sister. She had repeatedly emphasized that she would never give up her fight to make this regime-held accountable for its crimes and human rights violations, as well as seeking justice for the fallen political prisoners.
Mrs. Maryam Rajavi, the President-elect of the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI), has repeatedly reiterated the need for an international delegation to visit the clerical regime’s prisons and meet with prisoners, especially political prisoners. Mrs. Rajavi urged the UN Special Rapporteur on Violence against Women to investigate the health condition of Maryam Akbari and Golrokh Ebrahimi Eraei.
