“It is obvious that the Ministry of Intelligence, lacking any real cause or evidence to keep my wife, Haleh, incarcerated in solitary confinement at Evin, is trying to drag things out by claiming continuing ‘investigations,’ ” said George Mason University professor Shaul Bakhash.

“After hundreds of hours of interrogation and so-called investigation, what is left to investigate. The aim of the security authorities is clearly to coerce a false confession; or, out of sheer meanness, they intend to keep Haleh in Evin Prison as long as they can. It is astonishing that Iran’s political leaders allow this charade to continue,” Bakhash said.

To read the remainder of the article, click here.

Haider Mullick, a research intern at the Woodrow Wilson Center, has published an op-ed in a leading Pakistani-American newspaper (The Pakistan Link) about Haleh’s case:

Esfandiari’s illegal detainment is not just an attack on an Iranian American scholar or a highly regarded think tank, but an attack on the fundamental global struggle for objective, reasoned and unfettered scholarship…

How can an Iran that incarcerates a scholar visiting her 93 year old mother expect to placate Western fears of a nuclear showdown? Rather than commit such an egregious act as imprisoning Esfandiari, Ahmedinejad should have provided state funds to send government representatives to provide the other side of the story in Washington’s think tank world. Better yet he should have approached Esfandiari to act as a productive intermediary to expedite and strengthen ongoing back-door diplomatic efforts with the Americans. Yet instead he has just invited the scorn of the scholarly world. How many scholars will visit Iran now? And what will they say in Washington’s policy circles?

In a letter to President Ahmedinejad, Barry M. Kamins of the New York Bar Association calls for the Iranian president’s attention in the matter of Haleh’s imprisonment and her subsequent release from prison.

Your Excellency:

I am writing on behalf of the Association of the Bar of the City of New York (the “Association”) to respectfully request the immediate, unconditional release of Dr. Haleh Esfandiari from Evin Prison.

The Association is an independent non-governmental organization with more than 23,000 members in over 50 countries. Founded in 1870, the Association has a long history of dedication to human rights, notably through its Committee on International Human Rights, which investigates reports on human rights conditions around the world, including within the United States.

Based on Iran’s domestic law and international obligations, we protest Dr. Esfandiari’s arrest and detention and her deprivation of the right to counsel. We therefore urge you to immediately release Dr. Esfandiari, restore her travel documents and allow her to return to her family and her academic activities.

I respectfully request that you direct your attention to this important matter.

Very truly yours,

Barry M. Kamins

To read the letter in its entirety, click here

In her statement issued on Wednesday, Senator Clinton wrote:

I am saddened and dismayed by the continued detention of Dr. Haleh
Esfandiari and Parnaz Azima, and the recent arrests of fellow Iranian-Americans Dr. Kian Tajbakhsh and Ali Shakeri. I have joined the fifteen women Senators in writing to Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon urging him to intervene on behalf of Dr. Esfandiari and Ms. Azima, and I am gravely disappointed that the situation in Iran has been allowed to escalate. It is an unconscionable violation of human rights to detain and imprison individuals without just cause, and we cannot let this situation stand.

To read Senator Clinton’s full statement, please click here

Via World Politics Review

In New York Wednesday, Amnesty International and other human rights groups sponsored a vigil calling for the immediate release of detained Iranian-Americans by Tehran. In May, the government of Iran arrested four Iranian-Americans on accusations of harming national security.

More than a hundred protesters rallied in the humid mid-day heat outside the United Nations, chanting for the release of prominent U.S. scholar Haleh Esfandiari from the notorious Evin Prison in Tehran.

Esfandiari’s husband, Shaul Bakhash, was among the protesters.

“We know that interrogations at Evin Prison are not nice nor gentle. She needs medication. She needs medical attention. I think it’s unconscionable that the authorities in Evin Prison keep her not only in prison but don’t allow family visits or legal representation,” he said\.

To read the full report by Sean Maroney, please click here

Amnesty International, among other human rights organizations, sponsored a vigil today at Dag Hammarskjold Plaza for Dr. Haleh Esfandiari, an Iranian-American scholar at the Woodrow Wilson Institute, who has been incarcerated in solitary confinement for over a month in Tehran’s gruesome Evin Prison. The charge against her? Spying for the United States. She had traveled back to Iran to visit her ailing mother and was arrested by Iran’s secret police.

Read the full blog entry and see pictures by clicking here

Shaul Bakhash, Haleh’s husband and professor of history at George Mason University, wrote an editorial published in Wednesday’s New York Times advising The Islamic Republic that their own interest lies in the immediate release of Haleh, Kian Tajbakhsh and Ali Shakeri.

The fate of these detainees could be resolved by Iran’s government in a number of ways. Only one would be in the best interests of the Islamic Republic: the detainees should be freed and all charges dropped.

The three detainees are not connected to one another…But so far, their cases have followed an ominously familiar pattern.

First, there is an arrest. Then, to justify the unjustifiable, the authorities come up with outlandish charges and accusations; in the case of my wife and the two men, they are accused of spying and endangering Iran’s national security, allegations vague enough to criminalize the most common scholarly activities.

Next — and we seem to have entered this stage now — some in the Iranian leadership recognize what the imprisonment and false charges are doing to Iran’s international standing, and attempt damage control.

In the case of my wife and the others, the Iranian authorities can repeat the discreditable mistakes of the past or they can emulate the good sense they eventually displayed with the British. They can free the detainees and bring a quick end to what has become an embarrassing episode for Iran and a cruel experience for those they have so unfairly imprisoned.

To read the full editorial, please click here

David Curtis Wright, a professor at the University of Calgary, has published an editorial in the Calgary Herald recalling Haleh’s impact as a teacher:

For me, reports of detentions of prominent persons by governments run some danger of becoming routine. But not this one. This time, it’s different — it’s personal and hits home, squarely in the sternum.

I know Haleh Esfandiari. For an hour every weekday during the 1989-1990 academic year, she and Jerome Clinton patiently endeavoured to teach me Farsi (Persian, Iranian) at Princeton…

Haleh means “halo” in Farsi, and she was indeed an angel of a language teacher. I took up Farsi with the purpose of eventually reading 13th-century Persian chronicles of the expansion of the Mongol world empire.

I did not know any other Middle Eastern languages the way most of the other students in our small class did, so I was at a disadvantage with the language’s vocabulary, which includes many loan words from Arabic and also from various Turkic languages…

But Prof. Esfandiari did not pass me by. She neither assumed nor required any previous language work, and she endeavoured with quiet and dignified patience to teach her native tongue…

I well remember her formal and somewhat courtly manner, her pleasant morning greetings, and even the rattle of her keys as every morning she opened the heavy, old-style lockset of the office door on the first floor of Jones Hall…

But now she sits languishing behind a heavy door in the Evin Prison, with no indication that its keys will rattle against it with a pleasant “good morning” heralding her liberation any time soon.