DUBAI: Nasrin Sotoudeh (pictured), seen by human rights groups as Iran’s highest profile political prisoner, was freed yesterday, her husband said, in another sign that hardline policies may be easing under a new president.
Other prisoners linked to the mass protests after the disputed 2009 re-election of president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad were also freed, opposition website Kaleme reported, raising hopes among activists for a possible reconciliation between Iran’s conservative religious leadership and its pro-reform critics.
“It’s not a temporary release, it’s freedom,” Sotoudeh’s husband Reza Khandan said by telephone from Tehran. “We are all so happy from the depths of our hearts.”
Sotoudeh, 50, who defended journalists and rights activists including Nobel Peace laureate Shirin Ebadi, went on hunger strike for nearly 50 days last year to force authorities to repeal a travel ban on her young daughter.
With fears that she might die, the United States was among the countries criticising Iran and demanding Sotoudeh be freed.
The prison releases come less than a week before President Hassan Rowhani addresses the UN General Assembly for the first time and is expected to present a less confrontational image than Ahmadinejad, under whose power Iran came under ever-tougher Western trade sanctions.
Rouhani won a surprise victory over hardline rivals in June, pledging to ease some political and social restrictions, and his supporters have called for the release of political prisoners. Kaleme said one of those released yesterday was Mohsen Aminzadeh, a former deputy foreign minister under reformist former president Mohammad Khatami, who supported reformist presidential candidate Mirhossein Mousavi in 2009.
Feizollah Arabsorkhi, a former deputy minister of commerce under Khatami, was also released, the website said. The total number of prison releases was not immediately clear, but various news reports mentioned seven other women and three men in total.
Sotoudeh’s release comes one day after Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said he supported “flexibility” in Iranian diplomacy, a rare signal that he might endorse a shift in Tehran stance in its problematic relations with the West.
“It’s a humanitarian gesture and also it’s a smart political move, mainly because of the signal it sends to the U.S. Congress, which still cares about the human rights conditions in Iran,” Yasmin Alem, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council’s South Asia Center, said. Reuters
