Photo: Center for Human Rights in Iran, via Mongabay · Center for Human Rights in Iran, via Mongabay
Kavous Seyed-Emami
کاووس سیدامامی
2018 · 8 years ago
- Taken
- 9 February 2018
- From
- Tehran, Tehran
Kept on this phone only. Nothing is sent.
Their life
Kavous Seyed-Emami was a US-trained sociologist who taught for decades at Imam Sadegh University in Tehran, a conservative institution, where he stood out for a liberal, pragmatic approach and a belief in gradual change and personal responsibility. He said he felt it was his duty to teach his own, different views.
In his free time he led the Persian Wildlife Heritage Foundation, which works to protect Iran's rare animals, above all the last fifty or so Asiatic cheetahs left in the world. He held a Canadian passport and could have lived in Canada, but he chose to stay and work for change at home. A fellow academic said he was deeply knowledgeable and committed, and that he loved Iran and its nature.
How the regime took them
On 24 January 2018 he was arrested, along with other conservationists from the foundation, and accused of spying, on the claim that the camera traps they used to film wildlife were watching missile sites. Two weeks later his wife was summoned to Evin Prison, questioned for hours, and then told that he was dead.
The Tehran prosecutor said he had taken his own life because others had confessed against him. His family and the Iranian Sociological Association rejected that account, and UN human rights experts said his death in custody strongly suggested foul play. (Sources give his age as 63 or 64.)
