Iranian scientists' death sentence

by Salman Hameed

An Iranian scientist was sentenced to death last month on the charges of spying. Apart from the inherent problematic nature of capital punishment, this is deeply troubling. Now 75 Nobel laureates have written to the United Nations appealing for his release:

The group wrote to Gholamali Khoshroo, the Iranian ambassador to the United Nations, on 17 November, and the letter was made public on 21 November. The Nobel laureates express their concern for the conditions of Djalali’s detention; they deem his trial “unfair” and “flawed”, and they urge the Iranian authorities to let him return to Sweden,

where he lived. 

The list includes prominent names such as Harold Varmus, a former director of the US National Institutes of Health, now at the Weill Cornell Medicine institute in New York, and Andre Geim, a physicist based at the University of Manchester, UK. They wrote: “As members of a group of people and organizations who, according to the will of Alfred Nobel are deeply committed to the greatest benefit to mankind, we cannot stay silent, when the life and work of a similarly devoted researcher as Iranian disaster medicine scholar Ahmadreza Djalali is threatened by a death sentence.”

Djalali has been accused of spying and for the providing information that led to the killing of several Iranian physicists (which in itself was an abhorring act conducted by Israel and/or US - and should have been denounced more broadly):

Djalali carried out research on emergency medicine — specifically, on the response of hospitals to terrorist attacks — while based at the University of Eastern Piedmont in Novara, Italy, and at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm. 

He was arrested in Tehran in April 2016 and accused of collaboration with a hostile government. On 21 October this year, Djalali was convicted of espionage and sentenced to death, according to Djalali’s wife Vida Mehrannia and Italian diplomatic sources.
Tehran’s prosecutor linked Djalali to the murder of several Iranian nuclear physicists. But a document thought to have been written by Djalali has claimed that he was sentenced after refusing to spy for Iran. Djalali’s lawyer has appealed against the death sentence and is awaiting the court’s decision.

Read the full story here.

In the mean time, US-Iran relations keep on heading south. US is even blocking the deals which were explicitly negotiated as part of Iranian's freeze of the nuclear program. From Science:

The Iran nuclear deal was meant to usher in a new era of science cooperation between the Islamic republic and other parties to the landmark agreement, which deters the country from pursuing nuclear weapons in exchange for sanctions relief. But nearly 2 years after implementation began, few projects are underway. And Science has learned that the United States has frozen Iran out of a collaboration that the deal expressly brokered: ITER, the multibillion-dollar fusion experiment in France. 

Iran has been poised for months to ink an agreement to join ITER in a limited capacity. “It was all moving well, until President [Donald] Trump took office,” says Ali Akbar Salehi, president of the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran here. An ITER official who requested anonymity because of the matter's sensitivity confirms that the United States is blocking Iran through its seat on ITER's governing council, which must approve Iran's participation unanimously. Bringing Iran into ITER was expected to be straightforward. The long delay, European and Iranian officials say, casts a pall on other scientific collaborations expected under the nuclear deal. An ITER council meeting later this month is expected to take up the issue. 

To prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), as the agreement is formally known, curtails Iran's uranium enrichment program and mandates the redesign of the Arak research reactor to greatly reduce plutonium production there. Last month, Trump declared that the JCPOA is not in the United States's national interest; his decertification gave the U.S. Congress 60 days to reevaluate it.

Read the full story here.