“Lack of Rule of Law”
Iran denies Merz Sharmahd visit
7/1/2023 6:56 am
In February, opposition figure Jamshid Sharmahd was sentenced to death in Iran. CDU leader Merz wants to visit the man, who also has German citizenship, in prison. For months, Iran examines a corresponding application and ultimately rejects it.
The Iranian government has rejected a request from CDU leader Friedrich Merz to be allowed to visit the German-Iranian opposition figure Jamshid Sharmahd, who has been sentenced to death. As Merz told the AFP news agency, his application for entry was rejected after several months of processing.
“The regime refuses to give me insight into the conditions in which Jamshid Sharmahd, a German citizen, is being held,” Merz said. “This shows once again that the trial against Jamshid Sharmahd has nothing to do with the rule of law.” Merz announced that he would “continue to exhaust all possibilities to point out his fate and demand his release”.
The reply from the Iranian ambassador in Berlin, Mahmoud Farazandeh, to Merz’s request states that he is “always welcome in my country as a high-ranking German politician to hold talks there with your Iranian counterparts on bilateral and international issues”. According to the laws of the Republic of Iran, however, it is “not possible for foreign politicians to visit Iranian prisoners in Iran”.
Sharmahd’s daughter in grave concern
Sharmahd’s daughter Gazelle recently reported that her father was in terrible pain. “He was tortured, he can’t stand,” his daughter said in connection with a criminal complaint to the federal prosecutor’s office to eight officials in Iran. “I don’t know if he will survive.” She hadn’t been able to speak to her father for two years, he was “denied all his human rights”. She hopes that the federal prosecutor’s office will conduct comprehensive investigations into Iran.
According to his family, the opposition leader Jamshid Sharmahd, who had last lived in the USA for years, was arrested and abducted by the Iranian secret service in Dubai in the summer of 2020. Since then he has been in prison in Iran. On February 21, he was sentenced to death on terrorism charges, and the Supreme Court upheld the sentence at the end of April.