APPEAL FOR IRANIAN STUDENTS ALI YOUNESI AND AMIR HOSSEIN MORADI

May 7, 2020:

To the UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres
To the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights Michelle Bachelet

Hands Off Cain joins the concerns of the international and internal Iranian communities over the fate of two very young students, Ali Younesi and Amir Hossein Moradi.
The boys, awarded in 2016, 2017 and 2018 at the National Astronomy and Astrophysics Olympics, and one of them also at the World Olympics, were arrested by the Revolutionary Guard on 10 April 2020, and their fate has not been known since. The boys, both students of the prestigious Sharif University of Technology in Tehran, seem to be accused of contacts with an opposition group, the People's Mojahedin Organization of Iran, and of having elaborated a plan to "create a catastrophic situation during the COVID-19 pandemic", and to want to make use of "explosive devices" for this "plan".
The charges seem entirely unfounded and not substantiated by evidence. We know the practice of Iranian security forces to extort confessions with torture. All experts on the Iranian human rights situation fear that the "conspiracy" attributed to the two excellent students is a way to distract the population, and to attribute to the opposition and as usual to "foreign powers" the disastrous health situation of the epidemic of Coronavirus. These observers called on the international community to react, because they fear that the arrest of Ali Younesi and Amir Hossein Moradi will serve to prepare the ground for a widespread and brutal repression of all opponents, in particular of the student movement, and prefigure a catastrophe of the human rights in the post-Coronavirus months.
Faced with this tragic situation, Hands Off Cain asks you to intervene immediately to protect Ali Younesi and Amir Hossein Moradi and to send an international delegation to visit prisons and check the living conditions of prisoners in Iran.