NEAR Newsletter January 2008
Welcome to the NEAR Newsletter. In this edition you will find our most recent Action Alerts and also an ‘Academic Freedom in the Media’ section, listing news by country (January 2008). Any comments and suggestions about the content and layout of the newsletter will be gratefully received at roisin.joyce@nearinternational.org.
NEAR Action Alerts *Taken from the NEAR website
Iran: Nine teachers sentenced to jail by a criminal court in the province of Hamadan
Education International (EI) has announced that nine teachers - Ali Sadeghi, Yousef Zareie, Majid Fourouzanfar, Jalal Naderi, Yousef Refahiyat, Hadi Gholami, Nader Ghadimi, Ali Najafi and Mahmood Jalilian - have been found guilty of disturbing social order, issuing announcements and holding illegal gatherings.
Turkey: Professor faces five years in prison for comments on Ataturk
Atilla Yayla, a professor of politics and political theory at Gazi University in Ankara, Turkey, is facing a prison sentence for comments made on Turkish history in a panel discussion. The third session of his trial was held on 16 October 2007 and it failed to reach a verdict and a further session on 10 December also ended with no result.
Iran: Detained French-Iranian journalism student released
A Montreal doctoral student who was arrested after travelling to Iran to make a documentary was en route to Paris on Friday, according to the French foreign ministry. Mehrnoushe Solouki, a 38-year-old graduate student was arrested in February 2007 and prevented from leaving Iran for nearly a year after working on a documentary film about the Iraq-Iran war.
Afghanistan: Death Sentence for Afghan Student
On 22 January 2008 a journalism student from Balkh University, Afghanistan, was sentenced to death by a provincial court for distributing ‘blasphemous’ material, the BBC has said. Twenty-three year old Sayed Perwiz Kambakhsh was arrested in October 2007 in the northern Afghan city of Mazar e Sharif - an area where mullahs hold particular influence over law and cultural life - after downloading material from the internet relating to the role of women in Islamic societies.
Turkey: Professor Yayla sentenced for comments on Ataturk
Atilla Yayla, a professor of politics and political theory at Gazi University in Ankara, Turkey, was yesterday handed a fifteen month suspended jail term for insulting the state’s founder, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk. The court in the western port city of Izmir sentenced Professor Yayla over comments he made at a 2006 panel discussion, in which he criticised the presidency of Ataturk, saying it was not as progressive as some Turks would believe.
** Please continue to send us any relevant cases involving threats to academic freedom and education rights, for potential alerts.
The Network for Education and Academic Rights (NEAR) is a membership-based, non-governmental organisation which facilitates international collaboration between organisations active in issues of academic freedom and educational rights, and committed to promoting an understanding of, and respect for, the values enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
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Roisin Joyce
Deputy Director
roisin.joyce@nearinternational.org