Join with this distinguished panel of activists from around the world to discuss why and how we can win the struggle to free Iran’s Political Prisoners!

This will be an informative and challenging session for all participants.  It is being hosted by “Fighting the Power: Global Movements for Social Justice” summer session class of Professor Alessandro Morosin.  Students will have heard about the new wave of extreme repression by the Islamic Republic in response to unprecedented uprising in 2017 and 2019 that rocked all of Iranian society.  We will hear about the continuing mass protests and intensified repression since, up to today.  

The aim of this Roundtable and discussion is to inform and energize, cohere and activate students, academics and social justice activists to join with the growing global movement to free the courageous dissidents in Iran.  Several of the panelists are signers of the Emergency Appeal of the International Emergency Campaign (IEC).  It is hoped that this event will engage many more people to sign and get the Emergency Appeal further into the public square with an urgency that can have concrete impact toward freeing the prisoners.

• Shahrzad Mojab is a scholar/activist and professor at the Women and Gender Studies Institute and the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education at the University of Toronto. She will address the extreme oppression that women political prisoners face in Iran and the Middle East.
• Hadi Ghaemi has published/spoken extensively on the brutal treatment of Iran’s political prisoners. He will focus on the current uprising and repression in Iran, the absence of the rule of law concentrated in the imprisonment of defense lawyers.
• Larry Everest is the author of Oil, Power and Empire: Iraq and the US Global Agenda. He is also a regular contributor to revcom.us, and a spokesperson for IEC.  He will speak on what the Emergency Campaign has achieved in its year and a half worldwide efforts and what its plans are to win this fight.
• Satar Rahmani (tentative) is a leader of the Mehran Raoof Solidarity Committee, and spokesperson for International Alliance in Support of Workers in Iran (IASWI).  He will speak on the fight for imprisoned labor-activist and Iranian-British dual citizen Mehran Raoof and the implications of this case.
• Mariam Claren will speak on her relentless efforts to free her mother since October 16, 2020 by initiating the #freeNahid campaign. Nahid Taghavi was a women’s right activist at the time of her arbitrary arrest and imprisonment, sentenced to nearly 11 years in a sham trial in June 2021.

Moderators:

Professor Alessandro Morosin, DePauw University, Sociology Department

Dolly Veale, spokesperson for IEC, contributor to revcom.us