URGENT ACTION

Iranian human rights defender Narges Mohammadi, a prisoner of conscience, has been on hunger strike since 27 June in protest at the authorities’ persistent refusal to allow her to speak with her young children. As she suffers from several medical conditions and takes numerous medicines, the hunger strike critically endangers her health and life.
Iranian human rights defender Narges Mohammadi, a prisoner of conscience, started a hunger strike on 27 June as a last resort to protest the judicial authorities’ persistent refusal to allow her telephone contact with her nine-year-old twins. Her children had to move abroad one year ago to live with their father, as there was nobody to look after them in Iran after her arrest in May 2015. Since then, she has been allowed only one phone call with them. In a letter she wrote from inside Evin Prison on 27 June announcing her hunger strike, she said that all her requests for telephone contact with her children have been refused. She wrote: “I have forgotten their voices. I don’t keep their photos by my bed anymore. I can’t look at them… [The authorities] have regarded me being a human rights defender as a crime but more painful than that is that they have also denied my womanhood and motherhood. Until the day I die and fall silent, I will continue protesting and I will never forget.” Earlier in February 2016, Narges Mohammadi had written another open letter, this time to the Head of the Judiciary expressing concern that the authorities were denying her telephone contact with her children to further punish her. 
Narges Mohammadi is critically ill. She suffers from a pulmonary embolism (a blockage in the blood vessel that carries blood from the heart to the lungs) and a neurological disorder that has resulted in her experiencing seizures and temporary partial paralysis. She needs ongoing specialized medical care, which she cannot receive in prison, as well as daily medication, and a hunger strike puts her health and life at risk. On 3 July, she was taken from Tehran’s Evin Prison to Iran Mehr Hospital, also in Tehran, for routine tests related to her pulmonary embolism.
Narges Mohammadi received a 16-year prison sentence after she was convicted, following an unfair trial in April 2016, of the charges of “founding an illegal group”, “gathering and colluding to commit crimes against national security”, and “spreading propaganda against the system”. She is already serving a six-year prison sentence from a previous case. Her convictions are based solely on her human rights work.