Iranian judiciary spokesperson Gholamhossein Esmaili made the assertion in a Tuesday press briefing<\/a>, saying the judiciary does not have a predetermined list of places to which it banishes some released Iranian convicts who had been sentenced to live away from their hometowns for periods of time after prison. Esmaili was responding to Iranian state media reports published earlier this month<\/a>\u00a0citing a purported interior ministry list of 36 locations designated as places where convicts should live in internal exile as part of their sentences.<\/p>\n Article 23 of Iran\u2019s 2013 Islamic Penal Code<\/a>\u00a0gives judges the power to add a variety of punishments to prison terms for people convicted certain crimes. The additional sentences can include a \u201ccompulsory residence in a specified place\u201d and a \u201cban on residing in a specified place (or in specified places)\u201d after prison. Both types of punishment involve forcing the convicts to live away from their homes for specific periods, typically lasting several years.<\/p>\n ‘Improper’ locations<\/strong><\/p>\n Iran\u2019s penal code does not specify what types of places should serve as \u201ccompulsory\u201d residences for released convicts sentenced to banishment from their homes. There also is no such specification in a June 2019 judicial regulation<\/a>\u00a0explaining how the penal code\u2019s Article 23 is supposed to be implemented.<\/p>\n Article 135 of the regulation, published in Iran\u2019s government gazette, says various government agencies must compile only a list of locations deemed \u201cimproper\u201d as places of banishment for released convicts due to the \u201cpolitical, security and social\u201d conditions of those places.<\/p>\n Despite Iran’s lack of a publicly disclosed official list of places deemed suitable for internal exile, authorities in the country have been banishing some released convicts to certain impoverished and remote areas for decades, dating back to the reign of the last Iranian monarch, or shah, whom the nation\u2019s current ruling clerics ousted in the 1979 Islamic Revolution.<\/p>\n In Tuesday interviews with VOA Persian, four Dervish activists who have been forced to live in such places since being released from prison earlier this year said the Iranian judiciary spokesman\u2019s assertion that no convicts are exiled to predetermined locations is untrue.<\/p>\n The four activists, Saeed Dourandish<\/a>, Reza Entesari<\/a>, Sina Entesari<\/a>\u00a0and Saeed Soltanpour<\/a>, all were detained in February 2018 during Iranian Dervish anti-government street protests in Tehran. Iranian authorities later sentenced them each to five years in prison, before granting them early releases in March and May of this year to ease overcrowding in the nation’s coronavirus-infested jails. However, the four activists also were forced to go into internal exile after being freed, under the terms of their sentences.<\/p>\n Dourandish and Soltanpour have been in exile in the eastern Iranian towns of Zabol and Zahak respectively, near the Iranian border with Afghanistan. Reza Entesari has been exiled to the northeastern town of Khaf near Afghanistan, while Sina Entesari has been exiled to the southeastern town of Mirjaveh adjacent to the Pakistani border. All four towns are impoverished and located 1,000 to 1,500 kilometers from Tehran by road.<\/p>\n Life in internal exile<\/strong><\/p>\n While serving their sentences of internal exile, released Iranian convicts are required to report to local authorities daily or almost daily. Some also face additional restrictions on their ability to work and interact with other people.<\/p>\n Soltanpour said he and other released Dervish prisoners have been sent \u201cespecially\u201d to live in poor towns near Iran\u2019s eastern border.<\/p>\n \u201cLife is a struggle for people in these poor cities and health conditions are bad, too,\u201d said Dourandish.<\/p>\n Reza Entesari said if judiciary spokesperson Esmaili is correct about Iran not designating any particular places as suitable for banishment of convicts, \u201cWhy are they sending political prisoners to internal exile only in cities with harsh climates? Why not also send us to cities with good weather such as Shiraz, Mashhad or Bushehr?\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cMy life is centered in Tehran, but they sent me all the way to the southeastern border of the country,\u201d Sina Entesari said. \u201cIran\u2019s intelligence authorities decided which cities to banish political prisoners to, based on where the released prisoners would suffer the most.\u201d<\/p>\n The Dervishes involved in the 2018 protests in Tehran had been demanding the release of arrested members of their community and the removal of security checkpoints around the house of their elderly leader, Noor Ali Tabandeh. He later died in December 2019.<\/p>\n Members of the Sufi Muslim religious sect long have complained of harassment by Iran\u2019s Shiite Islamist rulers, who view them as heretics.<\/p>\n This article originated in VOA\u2019s Persian Service<\/a>. Click here<\/a>\u00a0for the original Persian version of the story. Mehdi Jedinia of VOA\u2019s Extremism Watch Desk contributed. \u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" VOA \u2014 WASHINGTON – Activists of Iran\u2019s Gonabadi Dervish religious minority who have been forced to live far from home after release from prison have rejected an Iranian official\u2019s contention that Tehran has no policy of exiling freed convicts to impoverished and remote parts of the country. Iranian judiciary spokesperson Gholamhossein Esmaili made the assertion […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":88537,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-88536","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-latests"],"translation":{"provider":"WPGlobus","version":"3.0.2","language":"en","enabled_languages":["fa","en"],"languages":{"fa":{"title":true,"content":false,"excerpt":false},"en":{"title":true,"content":true,"excerpt":false}}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/PERSIAN-HERITAGE.COM\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/88536","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/PERSIAN-HERITAGE.COM\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/PERSIAN-HERITAGE.COM\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/PERSIAN-HERITAGE.COM\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/PERSIAN-HERITAGE.COM\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=88536"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/PERSIAN-HERITAGE.COM\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/88536\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":88539,"href":"https:\/\/PERSIAN-HERITAGE.COM\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/88536\/revisions\/88539"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/PERSIAN-HERITAGE.COM\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/88537"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/PERSIAN-HERITAGE.COM\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=88536"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/PERSIAN-HERITAGE.COM\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=88536"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/PERSIAN-HERITAGE.COM\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=88536"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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VOA \u2014 WASHINGTON – Activists of Iran\u2019s Gonabadi Dervish religious minority who have been forced to live far from home after release from prison have rejected an Iranian official\u2019s contention that Tehran has no policy of exiling freed convicts to impoverished and remote parts of the country.<\/p>\n