Persia at photo ,

Revoke Sentences, End This Cruel and Inhuman Punishment

(Washington, DC, February 6, 2008) – The head of Iran’s Judiciary, Ayatollah Mahmud Hashemi Shahrudi, should immediately revoke the sentences of death by stoning imposed on three persons convicted of adultery, Human Rights Watch said today. In separate cases, two sisters from the town of Shahriar in Tehran Province and a man from the town of Sari in the province of Mazandaran, are all at imminent risk of execution.

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“The Iranian government is set to execute three of its citizens in a horrendously brutal manner,” said Joe Stork, deputy Middle East director at Human Rights Watch. “The Judiciary must act now to end this inhuman form of punishment once and for all.”

In February 2007, authorities arrested sisters Zohreh Kabiri, 27, and Azar Kabiri, 28, on charges of having “illegal relationships” based on accusations made by one of their husbands. According to Iran’s Islamic Penal Code, “immoral” relationships such as those between men and women who are not married, may be subject to criminal punishment. One month after their arrest, Branch 128 of the General Court of the city of Karaj convicted and sentenced the sisters to 99 lashes.

Six months after officials handed down and executed the sentence, additional accusations by the husband of one of the sisters resulted in a second trial on more serious charges of adultery. Branch 80 of the Karaj Penal Court of the Tehran Province convicted the sisters on these charges and sentenced them to death by stoning. The Supreme Court has approved the ruling and the sentence may be carried out at any time.

The Islamic Penal Code of Iran allows execution as a punishment for adultery, and allows it to be carried out by stoning for this offense. The practice involves throwing stones at the convicted individual, who is buried up to the waist (if he is a man) or up to the chest (if she is a woman), until the individual dies from impact of the blows.

Jabar Solati, the lawyer for the two sisters, told Human Rights Watch that since the sentence has already been approved by the Supreme Court, only intervention by the country’s highest judicial official, Ayatollah Mahmud Hashemi Shahrudi, can prevent the stoning from being carried out.

Abdullah Farivar, 49, also faces execution by stoning. In December 2006, authorities in the northern town of Sari arrested Farivar on charges of adultery. A year later, Branch Two of the Penal Court of Sari convicted Farivar and sentenced him to death by stoning. The Supreme Court has approved the sentence. According to statements attributed in the media to Farivar’s family, local authorities informed them last week that the sentence would soon be carried out.

Human Rights Watch opposes capital punishment in all circumstances because of its cruel, inhumane, and irrevocable nature. Iran is party to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which states in Article 6 that “in countries which have not abolished the death penalty, sentence of death may be imposed only for the most serious crimes.” Executions for crimes “beyond intentional crimes with lethal or other extremely grave consequences,” are considered to violate the Covenant, and executions for adultery clearly fall into this category. According to Article 7 of the covenant, “no one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.” As a particularly brutal form of execution, death by stoning violates the provisions of this Article.

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Final Treaty Negotiations Set for Dublin in May 2008

(Wellington, February 22, 2008) – Eighty-two nations endorsed a strongly worded draft treaty on cluster munitions, moving the world closer to a ban on weapons that cause horrific civilian casualties, Human Rights Watch said today at the end of a week of diplomatic talks in Wellington, New Zealand. The push for a comprehensive ban on clusters, which harm civilians during and after conflict, came despite efforts to water down the text by a handful of states with stockpiles of the weapon.

More than 100 states attended the Wellington Conference on Cluster Munitions from February 18-22, 2008 to discuss a draft treaty prohibiting the use, production, stockpiling, and trade of cluster munitions. Eighty-two endorsed the Wellington Declaration, which commits states to participate in the formal negotiations in Dublin, Ireland, from May 19-30, and to conduct the negotiations on the basis of the text developed in Wellington. Others are expected to endorse the declaration ahead of the Dublin meeting.

“It was heartening to see so many governments determined to create a cluster munitions treaty that will make a real difference in saving civilian lives and limbs,” said Steve Goose, director of the Arms Division of Human Rights Watch. “All proposals to weaken the draft treaty – most notably by Denmark, France, Germany, Japan, and the United Kingdom – were rejected.”

However, it is expected that the proposals will be re-considered at the Dublin negotiations and Human Rights Watch urged participants to hold fast to the Wellington text and ensure the creation of an effective treaty.

Cluster munitions are large weapons that release dozens or hundreds of smaller submunitions. Air-dropped or ground-launched, they cause two major humanitarian problems. First, their wide-area effect virtually guarantees civilian casualties when they are used in populated areas. Second, many of the submunitions do not explode on impact as designed but lie around like landmines, causing civilian casualties for months or years to come.

One year ago in Oslo, Norway, 46 states agreed to conclude a treaty by the end of 2008 that bans cluster munitions “that cause unacceptable harm to civilians.” The treaty was then developed and discussed in subsequent international meetings in Peru and Austria, as well as regional meetings in Cambodia, Costa Rica, Serbia, and Belgium.

“The Wellington draft treaty is an excellent basis for negotiations,” said Goose. “The agreement to send it on to Dublin for final negotiation without watering it down is a victory for those who want an end to the civilian harm caused by cluster munitions.”

In addition to the ban, the treaty also includes provisions requiring clearance of contaminated areas and assistance to victims.

States affected by clusters, particularly Cambodia, Laos, and Lebanon, spoke out strongly in favor of the Wellington text, as did others in the developing world, notably Indonesia.

About 140 representatives of nongovernmental organizations from 34 countries participated, with particularly compelling testimony provided by cluster munitions survivors.

The attempts to weaken the treaty came in three main issues: efforts to exempt certain types of cluster munitions or technologies from the ban altogether; to have a “transition period” in which the banned weapons could still be used, and to delete or gut a provision that prohibits states from “assisting” with the use of cluster munitions by armed forces that are not part of the treaty (so-called “interoperability” concerns). Some states also pushed to delete a provision that calls on user states to help with the clearance of cluster munitions from conflicts that pre-date the treaty.

The most objectionable proposals for exceptions were put forward by France, Germany, Japan, and Switzerland; for a transition period by Germany and Japan (with notable support from the United Kingdom); and for interoperability by Canada, Germany, and Japan (with notable support from Australia). Other states vocal in their support of provisions to weaken the treaty included the Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, Italy, the Netherlands, Slovakia, Spain, and Sweden.

Despite the fact that none of these proposals were included in the final draft treaty text, all of these states decided to endorse the Wellington Declaration and to participate fully in the Dublin negotiations. Until the last moment, it appeared many would refuse to endorse, and would walk away, as some had privately threatened to do. On the positive side, there was notable movement in the right direction in many of these countries on these and other issues during the course of the week, giving confidence that a strong treaty will emerge from Dublin.

Although many of the main users of cluster munitions, such as Israel, the United States, and Russia, did not attend the conference, 75 percent of the world’s cluster munitions stockpilers were present, and most of the producers and past users.

The treaty process was sparked in part by the recent conflict between Israel and Hezbollah in Lebanon in 2006. As documented in a Human Rights Watch report released earlier this week, Israel dropped an alarming 4.6 million submunitions on southern Lebanon during the fighting. Up to 1 million duds failed to explode and remained on the ground as de facto landmines, threatening the lives and livelihoods of civilians.

At least 14 countries and a small number of non-state armed groups have used cluster munitions in at least 30 countries and areas. Thirty-four countries are known to have produced more than 210 different types of air-dropped and surface-launched cluster munitions. At least 13 countries have transferred more than 50 types of cluster munitions to at least 60 countries.

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Many of the people detained since the inauguration of the Ahmadinejad administration are associated with broadly defined movements, such as student groups, women’s rights campaigns, or independent labor organizations. Yet the government also has targeted independent scholars, journalists, and activists who do not directly affiliate themselves with any of these movements, arbitrarily arresting and detaining them in Evin 209 and subsequently accusing them on familiar charges of being “spies,” having “relationships with foreigners,” “receiving funds from foreigners,” and “acting against national security.”

The cases of journalist Ali Farahbakhsh as well as Iranian-American scholars Haleh Esfandiari and Kian Tajbakhsh exemplify a pattern of detention and interrogation that has become commonplace in Iran during the two years of Ahmadinejad’s administration.

On November 26, 2006, the security forces in Tehran detained Ali Farahbakhsh, a journalist and economist, one week after he had returned from a conference for journalists held in India. Farahbakhsh, who has no known history of political or social activism, was an independent researcher of economics and had previously worked as the editor of the economic section of the newspaper Sarmaye.¹³⁰ The fact that Farahbakhsh was not engaged in any political writing or activities prior to his arrest made his case particularly puzzling.

Farahbakhsh had spent the week prior to his detention in daily interrogation sessions that lasted until late at night, when authorities would take him back home. Farahbakhsh’s family told Human Rights Watch that during the first week of interrogations when agents from the Ministry of Information allowed him to return home at the end of the day, they pressured him to sign confessions admitting to the charges of “espionage” that they would later bring against him.¹³¹

The authorities did not announce any formal charges during the interrogations or upon his subsequent arrest and transfer to Evin prison, where he spent 44 days in solitary confinement in Section 209. In interviews with the press and multiple letters to Ayatollah Shahrudi, the head of Iran’s Judiciary, Farahbakhsh’s family expressed their concern about his deteriorating health and lack of proper medical care in prison.¹³² On February 4, 2007, over two months after Farahbakhsh’s arrest, his lawyer, Sayyed Mahmoud Alizadeh Tabatabayee, said in reports to the Iranian Labor News Agency that the government had charged his client with “espionage,” but had denied him the opportunity to examine Farahbakhsh’s case file. Tabatabayee met his client for the first time on the first day of the March trial.

On March 26, Branch Six of Iran’s Revolutionary Court sentenced Farahbakhsh to a three-year prison term on charges of “espionage” and “taking money from foreigners.”¹³³ It appears that he may have been charged under Article 508 of the Islamic Penal Code, which states that “whoever collaborates in any way with a group or hostile foreign sources against the Islamic Republic of Iran” may be sentenced to one to ten years in prison.¹³⁴ The law does not specifically define what counts as collaboration or what constitutes working against the government.

After 318 days in prison, 45 of which were spent in solitary confinement, the authorities released Farahbaksh on September 26.¹³⁵

Haleh Esfandiari, a 67-year old dual Iranian and American citizen who heads the Middle East program at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, DC, traveled to Iran in December 2006 to visit her ailing 93-year-old mother. Prior to her planned departure from Iran on December 30, armed and masked men stopped her taxi and seized both of her passports. Iranian authorities did not return her passports and instead subjected her to repeated and protracted interrogation sessions.¹³⁶

On May 8, officials at the Ministry of Information arrested Esfandiari without warrant and later accused her of “furthering the interests of foreign powers,” “espionage,” “planning the soft overthrow of the government,” and “acting against national security.”¹³⁷ They transferred her to Evin, where they placed her in solitary confinement in Section 209 and denied her access to her lawyer and family visits.¹³⁸ Esfandiari’s case received wide international media attention, and human rights organizations around the world protested her detention.¹³⁹ On August 21 the authorities released her on US$300,000 bail.¹⁴⁰ On September 2, Ministry of Information agents returned Esfandiari’s passport, and she returned to the United States on September 7.¹⁴¹ However, the government’s case against Esfandiari remains open.

According to statements by both Esfandiari’s family and her employers at the Woodrow Wilson Center, Esfandiari’s interrogators had pressured her to implicate herself and the Woodrow Wilson Center “in activities in which it had no part.”¹⁴² Since her release, she has not provided much commentary on her experience, other than to note that solitary confinement was hard for someone her age. ¹⁴³

Agents from the Ministry of Information arrested Kian Tajbakhsh at his home on May 11, 2007, on the same charges under the Security Laws of “furthering the interests of foreign powers,” “espionage,” “planning the soft overthrow of the government,” and “acting against national security.¹⁴⁴ The government apparently focused on Tajbakhsh because of his ties with foreign institutions, namely the Soros Foundation, for whom he worked as a consultant. An urban planner and scholar, Tajbakhsh had also worked with a number of Iranian organizations and ministries.¹⁴⁵

On the day of his arrest, agents of the Ministry of Information transferred Tajbakhsh to the solitary confinement cells of Evin 209.¹⁴⁶ They released him on September 20 on $100,000 bail.¹⁴⁷ The charges against him remain outstanding, and he remains in Iran.

On July 18 and 19, Channel One on Iranian Television broadcast the “confessions” of Esfandiari and Tajbakhsh in a program called “In the Name of Democracy.” The government’s airing of the show while the two remained in largely incommunicado detention without access to their lawyers raised concerns about how the government might later use their statements against them.¹⁴⁸

Authorities detained another Iranian-American, Ali Shakeri, a peace activist, on May 8, 2007, as he was leaving Iran.¹⁴⁹ Initially, the government denied that they had detained him; three weeks after his detention, on May 29, the Judiciary’s spokesman, Alireza Jamshidi, said, “Shakeri is not in detention, and there are no charges against him.”¹⁵⁰ On June 10, however, Mohammad Ali Hosseini, the spokesman for Iran’s Foreign Ministry, confirmed that the Judiciary had arrested Shakeri, but did not address the charges against him.¹⁵¹ On September 21, three days before authorities released Ali Shakeri, Kaveh Shakeri reported to Human Rights Watch that the government had brought no charges against his father or even provided an explanation for his arrest.¹⁵²

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*Jafar Pouyandeh, a translator and writer, disappeared on December 9 while on his way to a meeting of publishers at 2.00 p.m. in midtown Tehran. His body was found on December 13. The family was contacted by the police who informed them that his body had been found in Shar-e Ray, a suburb of Tehran, and had been moved to a Tehran city morgue. According to the family, Pouyandeh was apparently strangled although no autopsy has yet been carried out.

*The body of Mohammad Mokhtari, a writer and poet, was found in a Tehran city morgue on December 9. He was last seen alive on December 3, going to a local shop. Marks on his head and neck made it appear that he had been murdered, possibly by strangulation. Pouyandeh and Mokhtari had been summoned with four other prominent writers on October 1998 by the authorities in connection with their attempt to establish an independent writers association.

*The body of Majid Sharif, a prominent writer and political critic, was found by police in a Tehran street and the family was able to identify it at the Tehran city morgue on November 24. He had disappeared on November 20. Sharif’s articles criticizing government policies appeared in a monthly magazine, Iran-e Farda (Iran’s Tomorrow), which was closed down by court order on December 5.

*Darioush Forouhar, and his wife Parvaneh Forouhar (née Eskandari),were stabbed to death in their Tehran home on November 22. Forouhar was the leader of the banned Iran Nation Party and a former minister of labor in the transitional government of Mehdi Bazargan. His wife Parvaneh was a prominent critic of the Iranian government. The Forouhars frequently protested the restrictions placed on their nonviolent political activities by the Iranian authorities and had expressed fear about their personal safety.

These murders appear to be part of a pattern of government-condoned repression directed against critics in Iran going back many years. Many killings of government critics over the last ten years remain unsolved. They include: Dr. Kazem Sami, a former minister of health in the transitional government of Mehdi Bazargan and leader of a liberal Islamic movement, who was stabbed to death in his office in Tehran in November 1988; Bishop Haik Hovasepian Mehr, who came to international prominence while leading a campaign for the release of Pastor Mehdi Dibaj and was murdered in January 1994; Hossein Barazandeh-Lagha, an independent Islamic scholar critical of the government, who was murdered in the city of Mashhad in March 1994; Pastor Mehdi Dibaj, who converted from Islam to Christianity, and had been imprisoned in Sari, northeast Iran from 1983 to 1994, and was killed in July 1994; Haji Mohammad Ziaie, a Sunni Muslim leader from Bandar-Abas, known to be critical of government policies, who was found dead in July 1994; Dr. Ahmad Mir-Allai, a member of the editorial board of the cultural magazine Zendehroud, who was found dead in the street in Isfahan in October 1995; Professor Ahmad Tafazzoli of Tehran University who was found dead in Punak, a suburb northwest of Tehran in January 1997; Ebrahim Zalzadeh, a publisher whose body was discovered at the morgue in the Tehran city coroner’s department in March 1997; and Molavi Imam Bakhsh Narouie, the prayer leader of a Sunni mosque, who was killed in the town of Miyankangi in Sistan va Baluchestan province in June 1998.

Day by day and second to second. He is sitting on an old and broken chair in hall of Refugee Camp in Italy. His face tells me that he is so upset and hopeless. I want t o talk with him, but I think is not interested for him to talk.

I know. I know well about him. Now he is for more than 1 year in Italy and applied as an asylum seeker, but nobody cares. Italy is doing very bad with asylum story. The refugee story is very bad and sad story. This story is full of bad times, hopeless, suicide and so on.

His face is getting old and older day by day. I know, I know well what is thinking him to? I know what is telling himself in silence. I know all of that. But, why he is quiet?

 He is great! I know. I used to talk with him, he just said me: Ciao! (hello).

Here, in Italy the procedures are going ahead very bad and slowly. The government is under Mafia power. Further more, everything is by pen and hand, not computer. It seems here is a part of a new world where technology has not invented yet.

I’d like to talk about Italy more, Italy is just beautiful for tourists, nothing more. And that is all about Italy. 

I am in north of Italy by now. The city of Como is near Swiss borderline and is a very beautiful and silent city. I have much free time and it helps me to concentrate on some idea about movie making and photography projects.

Maybe you heard before one lyrics by hard rock music band,Metallica , King Nothing. It is one of my idea for making a short clip about somebody who are trying for earning money, gold and fame in this industrial world. I want to try to show this false try at this industrial world. It is not my idea that this try is wrong, I want just show the meaning of KingNothing in video and another work for be more professional. The clip starts with a music in background in blank and black screen. Much of shots are taken reversely in busy streets which people are going and running to reach work fastly. A person who is a symbol for industrial man is shown and stayed at center of shots with a crown on head. This person changes to various age group and sexuality in shots. From A baby to a old woman, from a girl to a old man and etc. I just work on this idea and hope make this clip soon with my simple gears.

Here I can see some persons who are refugee from Iran, Afghanistan, Turkey and etc. There is a fantastic idea for makind a documentary movie and that is an old man named Halil from Turkey. Halil is about 50 years old now.He was before a member of PKK group in Turkey. PKK are a Kurdish party with members in Turkey and outside of Turkey. They are in fight and war with Turkey gorvernment because they said that Turkey gov does not give them their rights. Halil was 8 years in jail in Konia city, Turkey because of arresting in a fight by Turkey soldiers. After Jail I came out from Turkey to register as an asylum seeker in Europe countries, he says. He was one year in France, five years in Swiss and now he is in Italy. His asylum seeker process has a problem now because he receive an answer by Italian Refugee Council that PKK organization is a terrorist group and we can not accept you as an refugee here. It is another idea that I am working on it for making a documentary movie about this tired man. I dont want to show a good or a bad face of PKK group, but it is interested for me to show the trying of an an old person to get positive by some European country at the end of his life.

War photography captures images of armed conflict and life in war-torn areas.War photography depicts the terrors of war mingled with selfless acts of sacrifice. Unlike paintings or drawings of war, factual images are not easily altered in photographs.Photographers who participate in this genre may find themselves placed in harm’s way, and are sometimes killed trying to get their pictures out of the war arena. Journalists and photographers are protected by international conventions of armed warfare, but history shows that they are often considered targets by warring groups — sometimes to show hatred of their opponents and other times to prevent the facts shown in the photographs from being known. War photography has become more dangerous with the terrorist style of armed conflict as some terrorists target journalists and photographers. (In the Second Persian Gulf War, several photographers were captured and executed by terrorists or shot by armed insurgents.

photojournalism

War photography

Photography can be approached from either of two directions. One approach is the way of the photojournalism, the quicked-eyed observer who catches life on the wing as it flies past the camera lens, capturing the spontaneous picture that will make the front page or family album.

The studio photographer travels an entirely different route. A painstaking craftsman, he plans a picture as carefully as an architect designs a house, often taking days to arrange his composition and adjust his lighting before clicking his shutter. rather that reporting events from the sidelines, he stages his own and exercises total control.

To acquire this control and increase his flexibility, the amateure begining studio photography may wish to acquire a whole roomful of paraphernalia floodlight, spotlights, reflections, tripods, electronic-flash units and view cameras of various sizes. He may also wish, as professionals do, to operate like the designer of a theatrical production, constructing entire sets. Professional studios are sometimes large and elaborate, with barn-sized rooms, carloads of expensive equipment and big staffs of photo assistants, set builders, wardrobe mistresses and stylists. But an expensive establishment is really unnecessary for most studio work, and any amateur can set up his own studio with nothing more than a camera, a room, a few lights, and perhaps a rool of seamless photographic paper for a techniques from professionals, he can even come close to their goal: a kind of photographic perfection reachable only through the studio photograper s unique ability to manipulate every step of the picture-taking process.

 Source: Introduction of Studio Photography by TIME LIFE INTERNATIONAL BOOKS.

Hi to all friends.

You can see my Audio & Video directing experiences about anything in this link :

http://www.aghakhany.com/video.php 

 
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