Mohammad Sadiq Kabudvand
Mohammad Sadiq Kabudvand, editor of the banned weekly Payam-e mardom-e Kurdestan and Chair of the Tehran-based Kurdish Human Rights Organization (RMMK), was arrested on 1 July 2007 at his place of work in Tehran by plain-clothed security officers. Following his arrest, Kabudvand was initially taken to his house in Tehran, where security officers confiscated three computers, books, photographs and personal documents, before taking him away to the Intelligence Ministry's Section 209 of Evin Prison. He spent the first five months of his detention in solitary confinement, and was reportedly ill-treated. His family was unable to raise the bail that could have enabled him to be freed pending trial. Kabudvand's trial began on 25 May 2008, and he was sentenced at a closed trial on 22 June 2008 to eleven years in prison by the Tehran Revolutionary Court for forming a human rights organisation in Iran's Kurdish region. The sentence was upheld on appeal on 23 October 2008.
Kabudvand has previously been targeted by the authorities for his critical writings and activism. The weekly newspaper which he edited, Payam-e mardom-e Kurdestan (Kurdistan People's Message), published in Kurdish and Farsi, was banned on 27 June 2004 after just thirteen issues for ‘disseminating separatist ideas and publishing false reports'. On 18 August 2005 Kabudvand was convicted of ‘disseminating tribal issues and publishing provocative articles' and ‘spreading lies with the intention of upsetting public opinion' by a revolutionary court in Sanandaj and handed down an eighteen-month suspended sentence and a five-year ban on working as a journalist. Mohammad Sadiq Kabudvand has reportedly written two books on democracy and a third on the women's movement in Iran, which were not given publishing licences.
Mohammad Sadiq Kabudvand suffers from a number of health complaints, including high blood pressure and kidney disease, and his health is said to have deteriorated as a result of ill-treatment in prison. On 19 May 2008 Kabudvand reportedly suffered a stroke in Evin prison and has been denied access to adequate medical care.