Dr. Nazila Nouri, a member of Gonabadi Dervish community who has been recently hospitalized in Tehran, is under pressure by prison security guards to wear handcuffs and shackles, otherwise, she would be returned to prison.
Dr. Nazila Nouri has been denied family visits and telephone calls from the time she was admitted.
She has also been told that based on verbal orders of higher officials, she is not permitted to have anyone accompany her.
The pressures by the prison’s authorities comes at a time when Mrs. Nuri has been recommended for a surgery by the doctors.
At least 10 women from Iran’s Gonabadi Dervishes community have been arbitrarily detained in Qarchak Prison (Shahr-e Ray) in inhuman conditions, without access to their lawyers, since February 2018. These women have suffered a range of health problems in custody, due to ill-treatment by security forces.
The women were arrested during a peaceful protest gathering of dervishes in Tehran on February 19, 2018, which was brutally attacked by the State Security forces. Some 70 women were arrested in this crackdown at least ten of whom were transferred to Qarchak Prison.
Amnesty International issued a statement on May 25, 2018, expressing concern about the safety and health of prisoners of conscience from the Gonabadi Dervishes community in the Qarchak (or Shahr-e Ray) Prison. AI said it received testimonies indicating that doctors at the prison, a former industrial chicken farm in Varamin, are routinely dismissing the women’s complaints of pain and discomfort as “fake” while refusing to prescribe them medication on a timely basis or carry out thorough diagnostic tests.
