IWAC – Kaveh and Yashar Dar’ol Shafa, musician, Marxist researcher and author, and activist brothers; they were summoned under the pretext of an exchange over their medical situation by the authorities, yet they both were transferred to Evin Prison for the execution of their imprisonment sentence; Yashar Dar’ol Shafa, a 40 years old leftist student activist and Marxist studies researcher and musician, has spent most of the years of the latest decade of his life in prison; for the first time, by the rise of Green Movement in 2009, after two times of arrest, he was charged with “collusion and conspiracy against national security” and “insult against the president” of the time, Mahmud Ahmadinejhad, he was sentenced to seven years of imprisonment; a sentence which was reduced to five years and a half at the Court of Appeals. It was in autumn 2012, when he defended his masters dissertation under the pressure of detention, and was sent to start his five years of imprisonment; he got released eventually after four years and two months of serving his sentence; and during the same period of detention, on Apr. 17, 2014, he was the victim of brutal battery of the prison security forces along with his cell-mates at Evin’s ward 350 which resulted in long-term and severe injuries for many of these prisoners; according to HRA, the Iranian human rights news agency, on May, 2014, while Yashar was in prison, his brother Kaveh was arrested over participating in a demonstration held in protest to the violent crackdown of the prisoners at ward 350 in Evin Prison and got released after 15 days; however, after five years and following the mass protests of Nov. 2019 in response to the increase of fuel price in Iran, Yashar, who was then in pursuit of the final stages of his PhD dissertation, was arrested at one of his friend’s place by the security forces and taken to an unknown location on Nov. 21. After a month having gone with no update on his status, he informed his family via a phone call that he had been transferred to Evin Prison and taken under persecution by the Ministry of Intelligence; after 42 days of solitary confinement and persecutions by the organization mentioned above, he was released on a heavy sum of bail; his brother, Kaveh, was arrested by the security forces as well on Nov. 25, and, in addition to frequent persecutions, was kept in solitary confinement for two months; Kaveh and Yashar were then eventually charged with “propaganda against the regime” and subjected to note 500 of the Islamic Penal Code and thus sentenced to 10 and 15 months of imprisonment respectively and the same court, making reference to note 137 of Islamic Penal Code, made an increase of one-fourth of the whole imprisonment period in the sentence attributed to Yashar; security forces summoned these two brothers under the pretext of having an exchange over their medical conditions on Aug. 14, 2022, but transferred them both to Evin Prison to make them serve their sentence. This was while Yashar’s leg had been broken from a previous arrest on Nov. 2019 and, due to lack of proper care provided by prison authorities, had resulted in infection and consecutive surgeries after release from prison. Kaveh and Yashar were in the prison serving their sentence on Oct. 15, when the incident of arson in Evin and its subsequent bloody crackdown takes place and, after a few days, their mother publishes and recounts the testimony of his sons about the actual course of events of that day at this prison, which profoundly differed from all the claims made by the authority-backed media inside Iran. After that tragic incident, they were moved to Rajayi’Shahr Prison along with some other prisoners and are still kept there in detention. The latest news released about them was a photo and report claiming to belong to Yashar’s PhD defense session bizarrely held in prison, whereas, this claim was denied following to a report published on one of the Farsi-speaking mass media, explaining that the session in question was only an ordinary stage of the completion of his thesis made possible through the pursuit of his family and cooperation of his professors and not the actual defense presentation hearing itself and, along with another news claiming that Kaveh was given a prison break directly attached to ultimate release on Feb. 6, 2023, which, according to a source closely affiliated with the family, and a report released on social media was confirmed to be false, meaning that Keveh, too, is still in prison.
