Getting to Know a Student Activist: “Freedom is not Free”
December 1, 2010
Call for Articles and Posts: “Networks, Networking, and Change: Traditional, Social, Digital.”
December 9, 2010
The International Campaign for Human Rights in Iran has released a report detailing abuses against students for dissenting viewpoints. Many high achieving students have been expelled from Iran’s universities. “Excluding students from universities based on their political and religious views is a totalitarian practice that ruins careers and removes reform-oriented young people from future professional cohorts,” said Hadi Ghaemi, the Campaign’s spokesperson.
The Campaign reports that hundreds of students have been expelled. Many sit in Iran’s prisons on trumped up charges simply for engaging in student organizations.
Many students have reported that Iran is using a “star system” to identify students with dissenting viewpoints. They have reported that they have been given exams marked with stars and that the newspaper Etamad Melli stated that, “university registrars all over the country had received new enrollment procedures, [entitled the Procedures for Non-Enrollment of Starred Students] in which registrars were told not to enroll ‘starred students’ in the new academic term, and that students who object … should be guided to the Central Selection Committee.”
The report states:
Effectively, depriving students from higher education became a method of punishing dissent and a systematic campaign of targeting those critical of authorities. Information on students from university officials, the Judiciary, security agencies, and others acting at their behest is the basis for decisions to deny higher education or require written promises to end undesirable behaviors as a condition for study. These decisions are a form of extrajudicial or arbitrary punishment, having minimal legal legitimacy or basis in broad regulations. There is little transparency in the screening process, and no formal mechanism for appeal (with the exception of appeals to university Disciplinary Committees for expulsion decisions).
The 77-page report is available on the Campaign’s website: Punishing Stars: Systematic Discrimination and Exclusion in Iranian Higher Education
