A graduate student who was imprisoned for a month in Iran and barred from leaving the country for nearly a year has returned to Los Angeles.
Esha Momeni, 29, was charged with acting against Iran’s national security and held mainly in solitary confinement after conducting research on the Iranian women’s rights movement for her thesis at California State University, Northridge (CSUN).
In a phone interview on Friday, Momeni said she arrived in Los Angeles this week and, once her exhaustion passes, she wants to continue working on Iranian rights issues.
PHOTO: AP
Momeni’s arrest came on Oct. 15, after she was pulled over by armed intelligence agents and taken to her family’s Tehran home, where her thesis research was confiscated. Her computer and video interviews with activists were among the things taken by the agents.
Prior to her arrest, Momeni’s research in Iran consisted of interviews with members of the women’s movement, focusing on the One Million Signatures campaign, which calls for equity in the law between genders.
Iran’s judiciary system favors men in divorce and child custody cases, bars women from becoming judges, and considers a woman’s testimony to be a fraction of that of a man’s, leading to countless rulings that broadly favor men, the activist group said.
She spent 25 days of her 28-day term in solitary confinement and was interrogated 19 times. Momeni said she was not physically tortured and, as a dual citizen of the US and Iran, her treatment was more humane than others held in notorious Evin prison.
“The experience I had in prison was not nearly as hard as those of other political prisoners,” Momeni said. “And now, since the elections, things have become much more dangerous for them.”
A security crackdown on protesters and politicians opposed to incumbent Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in the wake of Iran’s contested June 12 presidential elections resulted in hundreds of arrests.
Allegations of rape and torture have been made by senior opposition politicians and released protesters.
Momeni called for more public support of political prisoners still held in Evin “because it really makes a difference for their situation.”
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