Iranian authorities have arrested an Iranian-Canadian anthropologist on unknown charges, according to her family. Her passport had been confiscated and she was banned from leaving Iran in March, according to her family.
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“We, the Homa Hoodfar family, are very anxious about her well-being and hold Judiciary officials responsible for her health”, the family said. Hoodfar’s family believe that she has been arrested by the Revolutionary Guards, which act independently of Rouhani’s government and has sought to undermine his administration on various occasions. Neither her lawyer nor her family have been permitted to see her since her arrest, nor have they been given any reason why she is being detained.
“We are all very concerned about her. We are all very anxious about her”, Ms. Ghahremani said. She is being held incommunicado and without charge in Evin prison in Tehran. We don’t know if she’s in solitary confinement.
Hoodfar has repeatedly travelled to Iran in the past but the illness of her husband, who died a year ago, prevented her from travelling there more recently. “It took a psychological toll on her”, she said.
Homa Hoodfar, 65, is shown in this undated image provided by her family.
She added, “The veil and female genital mutilation were two subjects that I had said I would never write about”.
VICE News reached out to Global Affairs Canada for comment Wednesday but has yet to hear back. Amnesty International is calling for her release.
The jail where the professor is being held has been nicknamed Evin University due to its high population of academics and political prisoners in custody.
Her research wasn’t exclusively focused on Iran, but included examinations of women’s rights in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Egypt and within Canada’s Muslim community. Zahra Kazemi, a Canadian-Iranian freelance photo-reporter, died there in 2003, after being raped and severely beaten. “We’re quite anxious about the overall situation”. He was in Iran covering the 2009 election, which saw Mahmoud Ahmadinejad declared the president, prompting mass protests from Iranians who viewed the election results as a fraud.
Mr. Khavari, who is also a dual Iranian-Canadian citizen, fled Iran to Toronto in September of 2011 as prosecutors in Tehran sough to question him in connection with a $2.6-billion embezzlement and money-laundering scandal.
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Hoodfar, who teaches sociology and anthropology is known for her research on development, culture and gender in the Middle East, in particular studying campaigns to stop the stoning of women.
