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An Iranian human rights group says rights defenders in Iran in 2021 received a total of 479 years in prison and were subjected to a host of inhumane treatments.

Human Rights in Iran, based in New York, in a report issued on December 16, titled 100 Iran Human Rights Defenders 2021, has provided updates on the status of 100 human and civil rights defenders who are either in prison, released on bail or were subjected to harassment by authorities. Those who were convicted this year received a total of 479 years in prison and 907 lashes.

In every case, the accused were tried without due process of law, being either denied a lawyer or forced to accept government-approved attorneys, without full access to case material.

Iran Human Rights Director, Mahmood Amiry-Moghaddam said: The world must not be a silent witness to the high price Iranian human rights defenders are paying for fundamental rights.

Human rights defenders, activists and families of victims who received sentences or were subjected to harassment and intimidation doubled in 2021, the report says. The 100 people profiled in the report are lawyers, journalists, teachers, womens, workers and civil rights activists, environmentalists, minorities and whistleblowers.

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Rights Defenders In Iran Received A Total Of 479 Years In Jail In 2021 - Iran International

Under-Secretary-General Rosemary DiCarlo briefed ambassadors on developments surrounding the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), which sets out rules for international monitoring of the countrys nuclear programme.

Iran signed the JCPOA in 2015 alongside China, France, Russia, the United Kingdom and the United States, together with Germany and the European Union.

Negotiations are underway in Vienna to revive the deal after the US pulled out in 2018 under the Trump administration.

In recent days, both Iran and the United States have again affirmed their seriousness in seeking to return to full implementation of the JCPOA, Ms. DiCarlo told the Council.

The Secretary-General is encouraged by these pledges and calls on both countries to expeditiously translate these commitments into a mutually acceptable agreement.

Ms. DiCarlo recalled that the JCPOA is widely regarded as a cornerstone of nuclear non-proliferation, and an example of what dialogue and diplomacy can achieve.

A Security Council resolution endorses the deal, and guarantees that the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) will have regular access to Irans nuclear programme.

The Secretary-General hopes that in their current negotiations, the United States and the Islamic Republic of Iran will mobilize the same spirit and commitment that resulted in the JCPOA. There is simply no viable alternative to the full and effective implementation of the Plan and the resolution, she stressed.

In this regard, Ms. DiCarlo said that alongside the UN chief, she appealed to the US to lift or waive sanctions against Iran, as outlined in the plan, and extend waivers regarding oil trade with the country.

Also important is the extension of US waivers regarding certain civilian nuclear-related activities taking place at the Bushehr Nuclear Power Plant, the Fordow Facility, and the Arak reactor, she continued.

Waiver extensions are also required for the transfer of enriched uranium out of the Islamic Republic of Iran in exchange for natural uranium.

The UN official also called on Iran to reverse the steps it has taken that are not consistent with its nuclear-related commitments under the Plan.

The IAEA has indicated that research and development activities related to uranium metal production continue.

Furthermore, although the agency has been unable to verify Irans stockpile of enriched uranium, estimates indicate more has been accumulated at limits that exceed the agreement.

The IAEA has also reported that its verification and monitoring activities have been seriously undermined by Irans decision to stop implementing its nuclear-related commitments, while continuity of knowledge on its nuclear activities has also been hampered.

Ms. DiCarlo also reported on measures under the Council resolution, including concerns by several countries surrounding a ballistic missile launch in May and two space launch vehicle tests by Iran a month later.

She said debris from six ballistic missiles, a cruise missile and several unarmed aerial vehicles (UAVs) used in attacks against Saudi Arabia has been examined. Saudi authorities believe the weapons had been transferred to Houthi fighter in Yemen.

Similarly, debris from an alleged Iranian UAV that had entered Israeli airspace via Jordan was also examined. Israeli authorities believe the UAV was launched from either Iraq or Syria.

Ms. DiCarlo said the information collected is being analysed and a report is forthcoming.

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'Additional effort and patience' needed to revive Iran nuclear deal - UN News

The Iranian flag waves in front of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) headquarters in Vienna, Austria May 23, 2021. REUTERS/Leonhard Foeger/File Photo

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UNITED NATIONS, Dec 14 (Reuters) - The door to resuscitating the 2015 Iran nuclear deal is open for now but "we are rapidly reaching the end of the road" to revive a pact that is being gutted by Iran's nuclear advances, France's ambassador to the United Nations said on Tuesday.

"We are nearing the point where Iran's escalation of its nuclear program will have completely hollowed out the JCPOA," Nicolas de Riviere told reporters, referring to Iran's 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action deal with six powers - Britain, China, France, Germany, Russia and the United States.

"Iran has to choose between the collapse of the JCPOA and a fair and comprehensive deal...Iran's continued nuclear escalation means that we are rapidly reaching the end of the road," he said, flanked by the U.N. ambassadors from Britain and Germany, a group known as the E3.

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He added: "Iran's nuclear program has never been more advanced than it is today. This nuclear escalation is undermining international peace and security and the global non-proliferation system."

Under the 2015 accord, Iran limited its nuclear program - which the West feared would be used to develop weapons, something Tehran denies - in return for relief from U.S., European Union and U.N. sanctions.

In 2018, then-U.S. President Donald Trump abandoned the deal and reimposed U.S. sanctions, prompting Iran to begin violating its nuclear restrictions about a year later.

Indirect talks to salvage the deal are now underway in Vienna between Iran and the United States in which officials from the other nations shuttle between the two sides because Tehran rejects direct contact with U.S. officials.

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Reporting By Arshad Mohammed and Daphne Psaledakis in Washington; Writing by Arshad Mohammed; Editing by Mark Heinrich

Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

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Nearing 'end of the road' to save Iran nuclear deal -France - Reuters

On the morning of Aug. 30, 2019, then-President Donald Trump was receiving his daily intelligence briefing with a a select group of senior national security officials, including CIA Director Gina Haspel, national security adviser John Bolton and other top aides.

U.S. officials at the meeting were delighted. The previous day, Iran had attempted to launch a satellite into space, but the launch had failed spectacularly, with the rocket exploding on the pad.

Included in that mornings briefing materials was a classified image, taken by satellite, of the botched rocket launch, showing extensive damage to the site.

The president was taken by the image. Trump thought this was very neat, and asked if he could keep it, said a former Trump administration official. And after some hesitation, the intelligence briefer said, 'Yes.'"

Officials had been nervous about leaving the image with the president, according to the former official, who attended the meeting. Gina [and other intelligence officials] may have said something like, Well, dont do anything with it, dont show it to anybody. But I think he just blew them off. He said, I just want to look at the picture.

About an hour later, Trump tweeted the picture.

Then-President Donald Trump in June 2020. (Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

Some officials worried that Trumps decision to release the image compromised a key U.S. spy capability, potentially giving Iran a leg up in concealing its nuclear and missile programs. Now, with the U.S. and Iran embroiled in contentious indirect negotiations over salvaging the 2015 nuclear deal, from which the Trump administration withdrew in 2018 and Iran appearing to prepare for another satellite launch, officials and experts are still split on the fallout from Trumps move.

Any effort the U.S. or our allies are taking to disrupt or monitor Iranian satellite launches should have been held in the utmost secrecy, said Michael Mulroy, who served as deputy assistant secretary of defense for the Middle East from 2017 to late 2019.

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The same technology used to propel satellites into orbit can be used to develop ballistic missiles, so top U.S. officials kept a close eye on these launches, worried that Tehran was aiming to develop weapons including, in the future, nuclear ones that could strike anywhere on Earth.

Iran is closer to a nuclear weapon than it was while in the [2015] agreement, says Mulroy. By some estimates, they could have one in a matter of months. This makes their efforts to develop a delivery system even more important.

But during the Trump presidency, officials had difficulty getting the presidents attention on the subject. It was simply not something, despite repeated efforts, I could get Trump to focus on strategically, wrote Bolton in The Room Where It Happened, an account of his time in the Trump administration.

One thing is certain: President Trumps decision to release the classified image was anything but conventional. Trump could not attach the photo to a tweet digitally, since the electronic devices some use to access their classified daily intelligence briefs are cut off from the open Internet. So Trump had an aide take a photo of the picture from the hard copy of Trumps daily brief and post it online, according to the former Trump administration official.

Trump's move seemed designed to mock the Iranians and raise the specter of U.S. sabotage. The United States of America was not involved in the catastrophic accident during final launch preparations for the Safir SLV Launch at Semnan Launch Site One in Iran. I wish Iran best wishes and good luck in determining what happened at Site One, he tweeted in the text that accompanied the image.

U.S. presidents have unlimited authority to declassify information, but the decision to release this image from a U.S. spy satellite without interagency discussion or first degrading the image quality, and on such an expedited timeline was likely unprecedented, according to former officials. (Indeed, academic analysts, using commercially available imagery, had already exposed the failed launch before the presidents tweet.)

Michael Mulroy, former assistant secretary of defense for international security assistance. (Monica King/courtesy U.S. Army)

Although U.S. spy satellites orbital paths are widely known to adversarial intelligence services, academic researchers and amateur astronomers alike images from these satellites are generally highly classified, as they reveal the satellites precise resolution capabilities, which are superior to commercially available technology, according to former officials.

The intelligence community was extraordinarily unhappy that Trump released the image, said the former Trump administration official, adding that a senior intelligence official called him after the tweet asking what the f*** was going on at the White House.

The tweet of the image was incredibly stupid and ridiculous and damaging, said a former senior official at the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO), the agency responsible for U.S. spy satellites.

The Office of the Director of National Intelligence and National Reconnaissance Office did not return requests for comment.

Some Trump-era officials recall the presidents decision differently.

Trump brought up publishing the image at the morning intelligence meeting, said a former senior White House official who also attended the meeting. And while CIA Director Haspel and other intelligence officials were opposed to the idea, they didnt blow a gasket over it, said the former official. In fact, this person recalled, the image was only classified at the secret level.

A United Launch Alliance Atlas 5 rocket is launched from Cape Canaveral, Nov. 13, 2020. (Joe Skipper/Reuters)

There was little pushback from top intelligence community and Pentagon officials about releasing the photo, according to multiple Trump administration officials. There was no particular angst about releasing the photo, said a former senior intelligence official.

It wasnt a crown jewel, by any stretch of it, says the former senior White House official. And in any case, say Trump era officials, advances in commercially available satellite imagery meant that the picture that the president released wasnt much better than what was widely publicly available.

Not so, says the former senior NRO official. The image Trump released was classified at the top secret codeword level that is, the highest possible level of secrecy, said this former official. The image was taken by a KH-11 series reconnaissance satellite among the most sensitive employed by the U.S. intelligence community, according to former officials.

The tweet cost billions in damage, estimated the former senior NRO official. The gift that [the Iranians] were given was, Oh, the Americans have this capability with this satellite series, now we know, said the former senior NRO official. Its because they saw the resolution the satellite was capable of, added this official.

At the NRO, officials worried about what their platforms might now be missing, since Iran and other U.S. adversaries newly aware of U.S. spy satellite powers would likely change their behaviors. It degraded our confidence in that capability to pick up things that we might otherwise have picked up, said this former official.

Iranian protesters outside the former U.S. Embassy in Tehran mark the 40th anniversary of the Iran hostage crisis. (Atta Kenare/AFP via Getty Images)

The image revealed U.S. spy satellite resolution capabilities that are three times better than the best commercially available imagery, says Jeffrey Lewis, a professor at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies and expert on satellite imagery. Mathematically, its not an order of magnitude better, but analytically, it was an order of magnitude better.

Lewis found the image highly instructive. As an outsider who tries to keep very close tabs on what the U.S. intelligence community is doing on the classified side, the image was a goldmine, and I learned a lot, he says.

Lewis believes that the release of the image likely had an impact on intelligence communities around the world.

I dont want to exaggerate how bad it was, says Lewis, who notes he is generally an advocate for greater government openness. Its not that the satellites stopped working. Its just that it aids countries in deceiving those satellites.

Lewis says Iran has introduced new measures to make satellite-based analysis of their launch activities more difficult, which he attributes to a mix of what the Iranians learned from the image released by Trump, as well as the increased public scrutiny from open source analysts like him. What precisely caused the change in Iranian behavior is hard to disentangle, Lewis says.

Some Trump administration officials dismissed the concerns about revealing the image as overblown.

I also heard those whines and whimpers and clutching of pearls from the intelligence community about the tweeted image, said a former senior administration official. But I did not see any change [in spy satellite capabilities], or nobody gave me a convincing case of why that mattered.

The former senior intelligence official chalked it up to parochial concerns at the NRO. To be very blunt, NRO thinks any satellite imagery that is ever released anywhere is a big deal, whether it comes from them or anyone else, said this former official.

Then Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump at a rally in Dallas, September 2015. (Tom Pennington/Getty Images)

But NRO officials were shocked and too intimidated to speak up, recalled the former senior NRO official.

It was almost like, you dont want to bring the weight of the president onto NRO because you can see that hes just gone with a flamethrower with the FBI and CIA, said this former official. And NRO was like, we just want to be left alone.

The presidents actions were calculated, according to the former senior White House official. Trump said that the tweet will get inside the Iranians head, whether [the explosion on the launchpad] was an accident or not, said this former official. He was pretty convinced he was going to tweet the image, and he did it.

The former official denied that the explosion was the result of U.S. covert action. The missile blew up; it wasnt anything we did to it, he said.

The Iranians are extremely accident-prone right now because they lack the funds to do the necessary upkeep on their space program, said the former senior administration official. There are things that do just happen by accident.

But others were less definitive about the explosion being accidental. There was a lot of heartburn over the tweet, says a former senior Pentagon official. If youve had, generally speaking, covert action success, you need to keep it covert. Because thats what made it a success.

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More than two years after Trump tweeted a classified image of Iran, former officials are divided on fallout - Yahoo News

An artist born without the use of his left arm, who has competed in the Paralympics, is to have his artwork exhibited in Edinburgh

Mohammad Barrangi, from Rasht, in Iran makes prints inspired by Persian storytelling and calligraphy.

For some of his work he uses poppy roll, a heavy fabric scroll similar to the old versions of papyrus a material used in ancient Egypt made from the pithy stem of a water plant for writing or painting on.

He also prints large-scale murals and works on raw canvas.

One of Mr Barrangis prints depicting a zebra on a yellow background (Mohammad Barrangi)

With the disability in his left hand, Mr Barrangi works on the floor and uses his feet to steady his work while he is cutting or printing.

When not immersed in his artwork, the printmaker has excelled in sport,previously representing Iran as a sprinter in Paralympic 100m and 200m races.

Taking inspiration from his body, the artist and athlete said his work often shows images of people with lost arms, limbs or other disabilities.

Without the use of his left arm, Mr Barrangi uses his right hand and feet to steady his work when he is printing (Mohammad Barrangi)

He also draws on images and ideas from a combination of Western and Eastern artwork for his prints, and from women he admires.

In my world, all heroes are women, he said.

I like to depict images of my mother, exiled Iranian queens or just friends who mean a lot to me.

I will often combine them with animals or mythical creatures, as my work often focuses on journeys and travelling and immigration.

Sometimes I combine elements from classical Western paintings with Eastern stories or imagery.

My Strange World (2020) print by Mr Barrangi (Mohammad Barrangi)

In August 2017, Mr Barrangi, who now lives in Leeds, arrived in the UK seeking asylum from Iran.

Now, with a Master of Arts from the Royal Drawing School in London under his belt, he is the first artist involved in the Edinburgh Printmakers new pan-European art project called In From The Margins.

The programme, funded by the European Commissions Creative Europe, which supports the culture and audiovisual sectors, will offer residency opportunities to refugees and asylum-seeking artists and/or artists affected by migration.

Mr Barrangis work will be showcased as part of the Anything Is Possible exhibition at the venue, which runs from January 22 to March 27 next year.

A portrait of Mohammad Barrangi, whose artwork will be exhibited at the Edinburgh Printmakers from January next year (Mohammad Barrangi/Edinburgh Printmakers)

Throughout the residency programme, Edinburgh Printmakers will be welcoming refugee and migrant communities in the studios to engage with resident artists, to share their stories and create new work.

Mr Barrangi added: My work ultimately shapes me and my feelings and my view of the community around me so while every exhibition is different it comes from my own innermost feelings.

Every exhibition I like to try new methods and new work. Of course there is a risk, but for me it is a challenge.

Mr Barrangis work combines elements of Persian calligraphy, storytelling, text, andtouches of humour (Mohammad Barrangi)

Mr Barrangis work is also included in the Royal Family Collection, British Museum Collection and the San Diego Museum of Art Collection.

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Paralympian from Iran to have artwork exhibited in Edinburgh - The Independent