{"id":12404,"date":"2018-11-02T05:03:33","date_gmt":"2018-11-02T09:03:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.irandemocratic.org\/public_html\/news\/?p=12404"},"modified":"2018-11-02T05:03:33","modified_gmt":"2018-11-02T09:03:33","slug":"in-iran-four-conservation-scientists-face-espionage-charges-that-carry-the-death-penalty","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.irandemocratic.org\/public_html\/news\/12404\/","title":{"rendered":"In #Iran, four conservation scientists face espionage charges that carry the death penalty"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Sciencemag.com,\u00a0sciencemag:<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n

Prosecutors in Iran have charged four conservationists with \u201csowing corruption on Earth\u201d\u2014a crime punishable by death.<\/strong><\/p>\n

The environmentalists, who work with the Persian Wildlife Heritage Foundation in Tehran, were arrested in January on suspicion of espionage. Iran\u2019s Revolutionary Guards accused them of using camera traps\u2014intended for monitoring rare Asiatic cheetahs and other wildlife\u2014to eavesdrop on the nation\u2019s ballistic missile program. Many observers view the detainees as pawns in a power struggle between the hardline Revolutionary Guards and Iranian President Hassan Rouhani\u2019s relatively moderate administration, which in a review last spring determined that the spying accusation is baseless. But Rouhani\u2019s allies have been powerless to secure the conservationists\u2019 release.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe scientific community can do a lot by challenging the narrative that is being sold by [the Revolutionary Guards],\u201d says Kaveh Madani, a water management expert at Imperial College London who served as Iran\u2019s deputy vice president for the environment for several months before leaving the country in April after coming under\u00a0escalating pressure<\/a>\u00a0from hardliners. \u201cPeople trust the scientific community, and once they come with their counternarrative, the hardliners cannot sell their BS easily.\u201d<\/p>\n

Human rights organizations learned last week that the charges against the four\u2014believed to be Taher Ghadirian, Houman Jowkar, Morad Tahbaz, and Niloufar Bayani\u2014have been upgraded to a capital offense. \u201cThis is a very bizarre charge to bring against environmental activists,\u201d and \u201ctotally unprecedented,\u201d says Tara Sepehri Far, a researcher with Human Rights Watch in New York City.<\/p>\n

Two of the accused serve on International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) panels that weigh evidence of the status of wildlife populations and recommend whether to add or remove species from IUCN\u2019s Red List of Threatened Species. Ghadirian and Jowkar are members of the cat specialist group, and Ghadirian is also on the bear specialist group. \u201cIUCN is deeply alarmed by the charges,\u201d says IUCN Species Survival Commission Chair Jon Paul Rodr\u00edguez, a conservation biologist at the Venezuelan Institute for Scientific Research in Caracas. Camera traps are \u201cindispensable\u201d for tracking the status and biology of threatened species, he says. \u201cAs far as I am aware, practically the only information we have on the Asiatic cheetah comes from camera traps.\u201d<\/p>\n

Iranian security officers have detained five other environmentalists on similar accusations; one, Kavous Seyed-Emami, co-founder of the Persian Wildlife Heritage Foundation, died in mysterious circumstances in Tehran\u2019s Evin Prison in February. Authorities claim he committed suicide. No trial date has been set for the remaining eight detainees.<\/p>\n

Posted in:\u00a0People & Events<\/a>,\u00a0Scientific Community<\/a><\/span><\/pre>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
By Sciencemag.com,\u00a0sciencemag: Prosecutors in Iran have charged four conservationists with \u201csowing corruption on Earth\u201d\u2014a crime punishable by death. The environmentalists, who work with the Persian […]<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":12405,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[40,5,37],"tags":[522,521],"class_list":["post-12404","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-entertainment","category-news","category-terrorism-fundamentalism","tag-persian-wildlife-heritage-foundation","tag-scientists"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.irandemocratic.org\/public_html\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12404","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.irandemocratic.org\/public_html\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.irandemocratic.org\/public_html\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.irandemocratic.org\/public_html\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.irandemocratic.org\/public_html\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12404"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.irandemocratic.org\/public_html\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12404\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12406,"href":"https:\/\/www.irandemocratic.org\/public_html\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12404\/revisions\/12406"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.irandemocratic.org\/public_html\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/12405"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.irandemocratic.org\/public_html\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12404"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.irandemocratic.org\/public_html\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12404"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.irandemocratic.org\/public_html\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12404"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}