Radio Farda
Niusha Boghrati

It is among the most familiar phrases to the roughly 8 million-11 million web surfers in Iran, the second-largest Internet user in the Middle East behind Israel.

"You Are Not Authorized To View This Page!"

More than 10 million websites are currently being "filtered" in Iran, according to the state Information Technology Company.

The range of blocked websites includes a handful of pornographic, political, or human rights-related addresses and even some forum websites.

At a time when the country suffers from what human rights defenders describe as a severe "information crackdown," a group of young Iranians inside the country is determined to battle the dominant policy of online censorship imposed by the Iranian leadership.

The group Iran Proxy is formed by some Iranian youngsters who believe that this "new dictatorial barrier" must be fought from inside of the country -- and that they must remain underground to be able to do so.

Iran Proxy describes itself as the first anti-filtering group inside Iran. It says it is focused on introducing and promoting simple -- and yet technologically advanced -- ways of helping Iranian users skirt web filters.

"Iran Proxy tries to teach to the Iranian users the advanced methods of getting around this new dictatorial barrier, which is the result of false policies of governments and religious extremists, in a simplified and understandable way through publication of a series of articles, one of the underground group's members tells Radio Farda on condition of anonymity. "We also plan to introduce the new anti-filter software and proxies to users."

Iran Proxy has so far created tens of proxy websites with search ability and also featuring fixed links to news websites that are currently being blocked by the Iranian government. The proxies, which get updated constantly and can be e-mailed to users, help surfers to enter the restricted pages.

Reporters Without Borders ranks Iran's press situation as "very serious," the worst ranking on the nongovernmental group's five-point scale. Iran's Internet censorship policy is described as "pervasive" by the OpenNet Initiative's global Internet-filtering map, the worst ranking it assigns to countries.

"According to the results of the worldwide research carried out between the years 2004 and 2005 by the OpenNet Initiative, Iran was filtering around 30 percent of the target websites," Iran Proxy tells Radio Farda. "The results revealed that Iran was practicing one of the most strict methods of Internet filtering."

The filtering in Iran primarily focuses on Persian-language websites, including numerous weblogs. In recent years and under circumstances in which writers, activists, and others complained of the absence of a free speech platform in the country, the phenomenon of blogging quickly found a place among the growing number of Iranian web surfers.

Weblogs rapidly earned a reputation as an electronic replacement that featured two basic and necessary characteristics of the desired political and social platforms for Iranians: capability to interact and security. The popularity of the platform reached a point that -- with around 700,000 enthusiast writers -- Persian language has become the fourth most-blogged language on the Internet.

But tolerance for the new phenomenon did not last long.

Shahram Rafizadeh, Sina Motallebi, Arash Sigarchi, Mojtaba Sami Nejad, Ruzbeh Mir Ebrahimi and Omid Memarian were among the journalists and bloggers who were arrested and prosecuted for their online writings. Along with the suppression, limitations were imposed on accessing websites, most of which included Persian news and analytical websites and weblogs.

"The statistics provided by OpenNet's research back in 2004 and 2005 showed that around 5 percent of the English news websites were blocked at the time," an Iran Proxy member says. "As for the Persian websites, the figure of the blocked pages reaches something more than 50 percent. Access to 100 percent of the pornographic websites and 95 percent of the proxy websites are restricted, too. This, of course, [was the case] three years ago."

Many Iranian officials have strongly defended the concept of "having control over the Internet" by highlighting what they described as the "necessity of preventing the access to pornographic sources." That point, which might win the support of concerned parents, later got overshadowed by features of the later versions of the Microsoft Windows operating system that provide its users with a chance to arrange their own restrictions and basically rule out the need for any external monitoring.

However, the new facilities to block pornography do not appear to have had much impact on Tehran's determination to keep -- and even broaden -- its surveillance over the use of the World Wide Web.

"In recent months, the Iranian state-run telecommunications center has begun the launch of an entirely new filtering system that includes a software robot able to observe viewed web pages and block them after drawing a comparison with the defined algorithms," Iran Proxy tells Radio Farda. "The new supervision system has got additional features that add to the country's filtering ability," the source adds. "The ability to block pages that link to filtered websites is one of the features of the new method that is currently being applied. Given these facts, if OpenNet repeats the research now, it will encounter blocking results so much higher that they might even be unimaginable."

In one of its latest unexpected policy actions, Iran's Internet service providers (ISPs) have been banned since late 2006 from providing Internet connections faster than 128 kilobytes per second (kbps) to homes and cafes. It is a move that critics regard as part of a media clampdown.

Experts believe that the decision is much broader in scope than the previous policy of suppression. It can also be considered among the first times that the Iranian government has openly denied its people access to "technology" in favor of censorship.

Human rights groups accuse Iran of launching an accelerating crackdown on information sources, including the Internet, in an effort to silence critics. They charge that the process has intensified since Mahmud Ahmadinejad became Iran's president two years ago.

Tehran denies the charges.

(with contributions by Radio Farda's online staff)

A newly elected pro-Kurdish lawmaker was freed Tuesday after nine months in a Turkish prison, benefiting from immunity granted to members of Parliament after officials confirmed results from general elections.

Sebahat Tuncel greeted hundreds of people waiting for her in front of the prison in Gebze, near Istanbul, with a victory sign, and supporters clapped and showered her with flowers.

Tuncel, who ran as an independent candidate in Istanbul, had been charged with "membership in an illegal organization," a reference to the Kurdish rebel group PKK.

The Democratic Society Party, or DTP, fielded Tuncel as an independent candidate to get around a 10-percent vote threshold required for parties to have representation in Parliament.

Under its strategy, the party planned to group its independents under the party banner once they were elected. It was expected to have 23 seats in the 550-member Parliament.

The DTP, which had not had legislators in Parliament since the 1990s, has been accused of ties to the PKK. The rebel group has been fighting for more autonomy in Turkey's predominantly Kurdish southeast since 1984.

The Islamic-oriented ruling party of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan won a majority of seats in the vote Sunday.

By NASSER KARIMI
Associated Press Writer

TEHRAN, Iran - Authorities announced new arrests in the cases of two Iranian-Americans held on charges of conspiring against the government, saying Wednesday that an unspecified number of Iranians had been detained.

State radio quoted Intelligence Minister Gholam Hossein Ejehei as saying that: "Internal elements related to these people have been arrested."

Ejehei did not say how many people were arrested or give details on their purported connections to Haleh Esfandiari and Kian Tajbakhsh.

"We are hopeful their names and reasons of detention will be announced," he said.

The Intelligence Ministry has alleged that Esfandiari and Tajbakhsh were seeking to set up networks of Iranians to foment a "velvet revolution" against Iran's Islamic government. Families and employers of the two have denied the charges.

Esfandiari, 67, the director of the Middle East program at the Washington-based Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, has been held largely incommunicado since May.

Tajbakhsh, an urban planning consultant with the Soros Foundation's Open Society Institute, has been held since May.

Last week, Iranian state television aired footage of Esfandiari and Tajbakhsh in a program that it said detailed the allegations against them. The 50-minute program showed a montage of disparate quotes combined to form what could be interpreted as incriminating statements, which their supporters and the U.S. government called illegitimate and coerced.

The footage also prompted criticism from moderates in Iran.

Two other Iranian-Americans face similar charges: Parnaz Azima, a journalist who works for the U.S.-funded Radio Farda, and Ali Shakeri, a founding board member of the University of California, Irvine, Center for Citizen Peacebuilding. Shakeri is in prison, while Azima is free but barred from leaving Iran.

The detentions have become another point of contention in the stormy U.S.-Iranian relationship. The United States accuses Iran of arming Shiite militants in Iraq, fueling unrest in Lebanon and seeking to develop nuclear weapons. Tehran denies those claims, and blames the United States for Iraq's instability.

The U.S. has detained five Iranians who the United States has said are the operations chief and members of Iran's elite Quds Force, which is accused of arming and training Iraqi militants. Iran says they are diplomats who were legally in Iraq, and demanded their immediate release.

(This version CORRECTS corrects spelling of Esfandiari's first name to Haleh, sted Hala)

TEHRAN, July 25 (UPI) -- After easing in late spring, the vice police are on the prowl again as Iran renews its crackdown on fashions deemed un-Islamic.

The vice police this week began stopping women with too much hair showing from under their mandatory head coverings and those wearing open-toed sandals without socks or overcoats deemed too revealing, the Los Angeles Times reported Wednesday.

Men wearing tight T-shirts or boasting racy haircuts also are being targeted in an effort to eliminate perceived cultural influences from western society.

"Some young people, either intentionally or unknowingly, are walking advertisements for Western sexual deviancy and satanic cults," Ahmad Reza Radan, the head of Tehran's police force, told the Iranian Students News Agency.

Offenders sign a document vowing to dress more modestly and abide by Islamic norms. If they're detained again, they may be jailed, the Times reported.

The Assembly of Delegates of International PEN, meeting at its 73^rd International Congress in Dakar, Senegal, 4 � 11 July 2007 Extremely concerned about the lack of progress in identifying and prosecuting those responsible for the torture and subsequent murder of Iranian-Canadian photojournalist Zahra Kazemi; and the failure to bring to justice those who ordered the serial murders in the late 1990s of Iranian writers and intellectuals; Shocked by the conviction for spying of freelance business journalist Ali Farahbakhsh on 26 March 2007, who was sentenced to three years in prison; and  the two year prison sentence handed down to Iranian Kurdish journalist Kaveh Javanmard on 17 May 2007, as well as the continued detention of the Iranian Kurdish journalists and cultural activists Adnan Hassanpour and Mohammad Sadiq Kabudvand and Iranian Azerbaijani journalists and cultural activists Said Matinpour and Abbas Lissani; as well as the prison sentences of three years and two years and a half years handed down by the court of first instance to Kurdish journalists Ejlal Qavami and Said Sa'edi respectively on 9 June 2007; Concerned that the security organisations have prevented the Iranian Writers Association from holding its General Assembly to elect its board of directors for the past five years;  Deeply concerned that the authorities have banned the publishing of hundreds of books including those that have already appeared once or several times in print, and have used this policy to pressure independent publishers; prohibited some films and shut down several cultural and artistic organisations; Further concerned that writers, journalists and others detained in violation of their right to freedom of expression have been tortured in the presence of judges, held for weeks in solitary confinement and denied basic due process rights;Noting that Iran imprisons the highest number of journalists in the Middle East, violating their rights to freedom of expression and to a fair trial, and often with long periods of incommunicado detention and lack of access to adequate medical care; Dismayed that the judicial authorities have banned an increasing number of writers and journalists from visiting other countries; and have harassed and persecuted a sizable number of journalists on returning to Iran from training courses abroad;Troubled by the state crackdown on women's activists and women writers and journalists, which has resulted in dozens being arbitrarily detained, at least eight of whom are facing charges, including prominent women writers and journalists Shadi Sadr, Mahbubeh Abbasgholizadeh, Jila Baniyaghoub and Nahid Keshavarz; and the prison sentences handed down to journalists Nusheen Ahmadi Khorasani, Parvin Ardalan, Sussan Tahmassebi  and Fariba Davoodi Mohajer.Noting that Iran's judiciary has shut down a number of independent newspapers, more than 30 weeklies and other periodicals, mostly in the provinces, and tens of student newsletters in the course of the past year; dozens of journalists and intellectuals have been summoned by authorities and many of them have been prosecuted under the restrictive provisions of the Press Law and Penal Code; Worried by resolutions that the government adopted in November 2006 to facilitate control of the Internet in Iran, which have been used since that time to ban access to countless Web sites; as a result of which thousands of Web sites are censored, on-line journalists harassed and privately-owned Internet service providers (ISPs) ordered to shut down or put themselves under government control; and including the crackdown on several Iranian "bloggers" who write and post information on the Internet, amongst them prominent Internet writer Arash Sigarchi who was sentenced to 14 years in prison, reduced to three years on appeal, in February 2005; Deploring the climate of self-censorship induced by the systematic repression of those expressing critical or opposing views against the authorized political and religious doctrines;Noting with distress that the International Bookfair (TIBF) held in Tehran 1 � 12 March 2007 only gave access to publishers approved by the Iranian government, and that international publishers were separated from domestic publishers, thus diminishing the possibility of a real cultural dialogue between Iranian and foreign writers and publishers;Alarmed that the Iranian ethnic groups, including Kurds, Azerbaijanis, Arabs and Baluchis, are prohibited from teaching and studying in their own languages; Further alarmed by the systematic suppression of public and intellectual dissent in Iran; Urges the government of Iran to:Release and drop all charges against all political prisoners targeted for the legal exercise of their right to free expression, association and assembly, including Siamak Pourzand and Ali Farahbakhsh; as well as all prisoners detained in violation of Article 19 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, to which Iran is a signatory;Review the Press Law, Penal Code and censorship of book publishing with the aim of the repeal all criminal provisions hindering the peaceful expression of opinion;Require and maintain the full cooperation of judicial bodies and security forces in ensuring that trials are conducted in accordance with international standards of fairness and that torture is abolished; and to bring to justice those who ordered the murder of Zahra Kazemi and the victims of serial murders of the late 1990s;Lift the ban on newspapers and periodicals, and to retract resolutions that allow for censorship of the Internet in its many forms and ensure the free flow of information on the Web; Conduct a thorough investigation of its secret prisons, granting full access to international observers;  Take measures to allow writers and journalists to freely practice their right to freedom of assembly and association; 

Take concrete steps to ensure the full and unhindered access to the right to freedom of expression in Iran.

Payvand News

Reporters Without Borders voiced deep concern today on learning that journalists Adnan Hassanpour and Abdolvahed "Hiva" Botimar were sentenced to death by a revolutionary tribunal in Marivan, in Iran's Kurdish northwestern region, on 16 July.

"These death sentences are outrageous and shameful," the press freedom organisation said. "They show how little Iran is bothered by international humanitarian law. They also show how determined it is to use every possible means to silence the most outspoken journalists and human rights activists."

Reporters Without Borders added: "We appeal to the international community to ask Iran to reverse this decision and to refrain from executing two men who did nothing but exercise their right to inform their fellow citizens. Iran is in the process of becoming one of the world's biggest prisons for journalists."

Hassanpour worked for the magazine Asou, which has been banned since August 2005 as a result of a decision by the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance. He wrote about the very sensitive Kurdish issue.

At his trial, which was held behind closed doors, he was found guilty of "activities subverting national security" and "spying." His interviews for foreign news media including Voice of America were cited by the prosecution. According to his family and one of his lawyers, Sirvan Hosmandi, he was transferred to Sanandaj prison on 18 July.

The charges on which Botimar, a contributor to Asou and an active member of the environmental NGO Sabzchia, was sentenced to death were not immediately known.

Three other Kurdish journalists are currently in prison in Iran. Ejlal Ghavani of Payam-e Mardom-e Kurdestan, a weekly that was suspended in 2004, was detained on 9 July of this year after being convicted by a court in Sanandaj of "inciting the population to revolt" and "activities against national security."

Mohammad Sadegh Kabovand, Payam-e Mardom-e Kurdestan's editor and the founder of a human rights organisation, was arrested on 1 July and transferred to Evin prison. He has not been officially charged.

Kaveh Javanmard of the weekly Karfto is currently serving a two-year prison sentence. He was not allowed access to a lawyer during his trial, which took place behind closed doors.

With a total of eight journalists currently detained, Iran continues to be the Middle East's biggest prison for the press and one of the world's ten most repressive countries as regards freedom of expression in the media. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is on the Reporters Without Borders list of the world's 34 worst "press freedom predators." Since he became president in August 2005, the authorities have cracked down hard on journalists. The situation is especially fraught in the Kurdish northwest.

Iran Focus

An Iranian opposition satellite channel has broadcasted shocking footage of a public execution of a woman and two men in Iran.

Simay-e Azadi aired the footage on Monday.

It is believed the woman and two men were hanged as recently as this month.

The clip was captured by a bystander and smuggled out of Iran. Simay-e Azadi said it obtained the video from supporters of the People’s Mojahedin (MeK).

Click here to view the film.