Sakineh Parvaneh, a political prisoner held in Evin Prison, has been denied the right to make phone calls to her family for nearly six months.
Since September of this year, Sakineh Parvaneh’s phone access has been cut off. Despite repeated efforts by both her and her family to restore communication, the restriction remains in place, with no official explanation provided by the authorities.
This denial of communication comes as Ms. Parvaneh is also unable to receive in-person visits due to the significant distance between the prison and her family’s residence. Her elderly parents are unable to endure the long journey required for visitation, effectively severing all contact with their daughter since the phone restriction was imposed.
Sakineh Parvaneh was transferred from Vakilabad Prison in Mashhad to Evin Prison on April 3, 2024. Months after her relocation, the imposed restrictions on her communication persist.
This punitive measure was imposed after Sakineh Parvaneh, in May 2024, staged a hunger strike in protest of the dire conditions and in solidarity with families who lost their children during the 2022 protests. Her deprivation of phone calls began on September 14, 2024, and remains in effect to this day.
Background on the resistant Kurdish prisoner Sakineh Parvaneh
Sakineh Parvaneh was born in 1988. In early autumn of 2019, security agents arrested her because she had visited her family in Soleimaniya, in the Kurdistan of Iraq. They took her to the Iran-Iraq border. She was detained for ten days in the detention centers of Marivan and Sanandaj. She was subsequently transferred to the Evin Prison in Tehran.
She underwent harsh interrogations under psychological and physical torture in Ward 2A, Ward 209, and the women’s ward of Evin. During this time, she was deprived of having visitations.
In March 2020, after she wrote graffiti on the walls of Evin, she was sent to the notorious Qarchak Prison, where she was detained in solitary confinement for four days with handcuffs and foot cuffs. Then, prison guards took her to Aminabad Psychiatric Hospital in Shahr-e Rey. After 25 days in Aminabad, the resistant Kurdish prisoner Sakineh Parvaneh was returned to the quarantine ward of Qarchak Prison.
On May 25, 2020, she went on a hunger strike to protest, being sentenced to 5 years in prison, banned for two years from membership in political groups, and detained in conditions where the category of their crimes did not separate prisoners.
On July 4, 2020, she was returned to Evin Prison while bearing scars and bruises from being beaten. In August, she was sentenced to another two years for “rioting in prison.”
The resistant Kurdish prisoner Sakineh Parvaneh went on a hunger strike several times in Evin.
On October 27, 2020, she was relocated from the women’s ward of Evin to the Prison of Quchan. She was sent to a solitary cell on Monday, November 9, 2020, in response to her hunger strike since October 31 in protest of her possible relocation again to the Prison of Isfahan. On the eighth day of her hunger strike, she sewed her lips. But in these same conditions, she was brutalized and beaten by guards.
On December 13, 2020, Sakineh Parvaneh was taken from Quchan Prison to the Central Prison of Mashhad, where she was deprived of family visitation and banned from calling home.
The IRGC pressured Ms. Parvaneh to make forced confessions against herself.
The resistant Kurdish prisoner Sakineh Parvaneh was serving the fourth year of her sentence when she was released from Vakilabad Prison in Mashhad on February 15, 2023.
According to reports on social media, the IRGC confiscated all Sakineh Parvaneh’s registration documents about four years ago.
Despite her release from prison, her documents were not returned to her. As a result, Ms. Parvaneh faced difficulties in basic aspects of her life, such as renting a house, finding employment, purchasing a mobile phone SIM card, and other essential matters.
