According to news on March 9, 2021, political prisoner Maryam Akbari Monfared has been abruptly relocated from the women’s ward of Evin Prison and banished to the Prison of Semnan in the 12th year of her imprisonment.
Reports from the women’s ward of Evin indicate that her cellmates protested her banishment and intervened to prevent her relocation. But prison guards violently broke into the ward and took her out of the ward by force.
Maryam Akbari Monfared has been in prison since December 2009 without a single day of furlough. She has been deprived of access to medical treatment.
Maryam Akbari Monfared was summoned to the Evin Courthouse on June 10, 2020, to be arraigned with her charges in a new case opened for her. But she did not attend the hearing because she had not received a written summon, and because of the Coronavirus outbreak.
Her court hearing convened on August 31, 2020. She is charged with “disruption of order in prison” through chanting anti-government slogans on the night of the anniversary of the 1979 Revolution on February 11. She says she had only protested leaving a sick prisoner unattended for which she was deprived of her visitation on February 16, 2020.
Maryam Akbari Monfared has three daughters. She was arrested on December 31, 2009, after the tremendous uprising on December 27 that year which shook the pillars of the regime. In June 2010, the Revolutionary Court of Tehran handed down a 15-year prison sentence for Moharebeh on the alleged charge of “membership in the People’s Mojahedin Organization of Iran,” a charge which Mrs. Akbari has never accepted. She has been in prison without a single day of leave since the day she was detained. She suffers from Thyroid malfunction and joint rheumatism.
Maryam Akbari’s sister and brother were executed during the massacre of political prisoners in summer 1988. Another two of her brothers were executed during the mass executions in the early 1980s.
