NED grantees Roya and Ladan Boroumand recently received this year’s Lech Walesa award, along with Shadi Sadr, a fellow Iranian human rights activist..
An Iranian court has sentenced Kian Tajbaksh to 12 years’ imprisonment for acting against national security. The indictment against Tajbaksh an Iranian-American, alleged that he was trying to foment a velvet revolution against the Islamic Republic in his capacity as a consultant for the Open Society Institute.
Observers said the allegation is especially galling because the government had approved his work with the OSI and had even invited the organization to work in Iran.
His conviction is the latest in a series of mass show trials aimed at repressing the Green movement that has emerged following protests against the fraudulent June 12 election.
The show trials and the resulting grotesque forced confessions of have a perverse logic, writes Ladan Boroumand, director at the Abdorrahman Boroumand Foundation:
For if religious democracy is founded on truth absolute and exclusive, then any other form of government must by definition rest on lies and corruption. Not primarily by their policies, but rather by their very existence do liberal democracies belie the founding principles of the Islamic Republic of Iran. And if Iranian citizens begin to petition their government to respect their universal human rights, then those citizens become ipso facto ideological agents and accomplices of Western democracies.
Ladan and her sister Roya recently received this year’s Lech Walesa award, along with Shadi Sadr, a fellow Iranian human rights activist. The three women will share a €100,000 (US$146,000 dollars) award. Sadr is a lawyer, journalist and an activist in the End Stoning Forever campaign.
The foundation’s OMID project is an attempt to “remedy the irremediable,” Ladan recently told the Oslo Freedom Forum, eloquently outlining the work of the foundation, a grantee of the National Endowment for Democracy.
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