Monireh Montazeri civil activist, photographer and painting graduate; she was arrested in Yazd on Oct. 2, 2022; There was no update on her status for nearly three months, but some Iranian human rights news agencies have stated that she had been transferred to of the detention houses of the security organizations, kept under persecution, until it is notified that she has been transferred to Yazd Central Prison after the persecutions were finalized. In any case, she has been summoned by Fata Police (Iran’s cyber-security police organization) on Sept. 28, 2019; on the same day, she posted a note in which she informed about this development, and added that Fata Police forces have made an entrance into her Instagram account, and have deleted those photos in which young women’s hair is exposed, then changed the password to the page, and in its introductory section wrote: “Due to posting [religiously] illegitimate photos, this is page is temporarily made inaccessible by the order of the revered judicial authority.” In addition, they changed her page’s profile photo to their own organization’s logo and asked her to attend there again in ten days to retain her account; the page in question then had 20.000 followers. She was, however, formerly arrested once on Dec. 2019, and got released from Yazd’s “Women’s Detention Ward” after three days. According to HRA, the Iranian human rights news agency, on Feb. 2, 2023 and after 124 days of detention until the termination of the interrogations and proceedings and on bail. And there has been no update on the details of her charges to this date, 2/21/2023. After release, she tweeted about her experience saying “…any change, on whatever scale, comes with a cost. I’m happy to have made a humble contribution to it.” However, according to her sister, she has been sentenced to two years of imprisonment, plus two years of being barred from doing activities in cyber-space and leaving the country; the curious problem here is that Iran’s Information Production and Exchange Police, or Iran’s cyber police, with the acronym of “Fata,” claims to be “an expert unit of Islamic Republic’s police force whose duties include exerting prevention and confrontation against phishing (internet fraud), forgery, cyber theft, hacking and infiltration, organized computerized crimes, pornography (cases of moral misconduct, as it were), and especially “against” the violation of individuals’ privacy, and yet, in practice, it has taken action in direct negation of its whole raison d’etre, and in addition to having fully violated the privacy rights of a citizen, and confiscated it in full, has also directly interfered with its content produced, and altered it at will and, in a way, the manner in which the “law” is executed and enforced is itself a perfect example of breaking the very same law and fighting against the alleged crimes reproduces the very same crimes verbatim; a problem that, within the framework of suppressive measures and systemic violation of civil rights and freedom of speech, does not remain at all confined to this singled out example act of Iran’s cyber police, or the recent period of severe crackdown of the mass protests of Zhina (Mahsa) Amini, but rather spread into all historical phases of the existence of the regime and all militia, judicial, and security-related dominions in which citizens and the state stand in conflict, and this is exactly why the landscape is so vastly dire.
