07 February 2017 :

To The Italian Prime Minister Paolo Gentiloni

To The Italian Foreign Minister Angelino Alfano

Dear Prime Minister Paolo Gentiloni and dear Minister Angelino Alfano,

in the daily monitoring work made by Hands Off Cain on the use of the death penalty worldwide, we see, almost every day, reports of human rights violations in Iran .

In these recent years in which the Italian Government has strengthened the relation between our country and the Iranian regime, we have always informed the Government of the worrying data on capital executions and the systematic violations of human rights. Nor we have ceased to ask to our country, that in the world is recognized as the champion of the Universal Moratorium on the Death Penalty, to reinforce the pressure on Iran on the use of the death penalty beyond the minimum standards of the international law and in contrast with the trend towards abolition of the death penalty in the world.

There does not seem to have been done much, or at least we did not heard words that are adequate to the gravity of the situation denounced.

Today there is a specific case on which we urge Your intervention: it is that of Ahmadreza Djalali, a 45-year-old Iranian medical researcher who is at risk of imminent execution in Iran , on charges of collaboration with enemy countries. The researcher is also linked to our country, having been from 2012 to 2015, assigned to the "Interdepartmental Research Centre in Emergency and Disaster Medicine" (Crimedim) at the University of Eastern Piedmont (Università del Piemonte Orientale).

He returned to Iran last April 24, and has been sucked into the notorious Evin prison where psychological pressure, with months of total isolation, have not destroyed his strength to proclaim himself innocent through nonviolent initiatives of hunger strike.

Those in Italy who knew him exclude he is a spy, and rather they think that they must have been the relations he had with Saudi and Israeli researchers, within the University master and the project for the management of radiological, chemical and nuclear emergencies (a project supported by the European Union) that have placed him under the paranoid attention of the Iranian regime as a spy.

Dear President and dear Minister,

how is it possible that the more Iran is taken into account as an authoritative political, economic and financial partner within the international community, the more it disregards the fundamental principles as enshrined in international human rights treaties?

It is terrifying the pace at which the Executioner in Iran has resumed work, after the slowdown in 2016, with at least 87 people executed in this first month of January 2017, including some young people who at the time of the alleged crime were still minors!

Really we think to collaborate 360 degrees with one of the most obscurantist regimes all over the planet, from the economic sector to that of justice, from medical health to that of military defence and even intelligence, remaining silent on human rights violations?
Do we really think that the fate that awaits Ahmadreza Djalali does not concern us?