As day of action begins Iran govt responds with arrests and intimidation

Today's worldwide day of action to free jailed union leader Mansour Osanloo has been answered by arrests and prohibition in Iran. This morning five members of the Executive Board of the bus drivers' union were arrested while state security agents have been positioned at Osanloo's house and are threatening union members who had planned to rally there to request his release.

Osanloo is being held without charge in Tehran's notorious Evin prison as the latest move in a brutal two year government campaign against him and his Tehran bus drivers' union.

Today's action day has been called by the ITF (International Transport Workers' Federation) as the latest tactic in its campaign to defend Osanloo and his fellow bus drivers. It is being supported by the ITUC (International Trade Union Confederation), Amnesty International and unions and union organisations worldwide. Protests have today taken place or are shortly to take place in Algeria, Australia, Austria, Belarus, Belgium, Canada, Egypt, France, Germany, Great Britain, Iran, Indonesia, Finland, Japan, Jordan, Malaysia, Morocco, Nepal, Netherlands, Norway, Pakistan, Palestine, Panama, Romania, Russia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Thailand, Tunisia, Trinidad, the USA and Yemen.

ITF General Secretary David Cockroft commented: "If the Iranian Government wanted to know why workers worldwide are putting them under pressure then they've just supplied the answer. Today's arrests and intimidation show that despite all the reasonable approaches made to them in the last two years, they have locked themselves into a descending course of continued repression."

He continued: "The news for them is that we won't go away. Mansour, trade unionists around the world and, indeed, their own people aren't going to give up. The demand is a reasonable one - the basic right to belong to a union. The government's clumsy, brutal attempts to stifle it are just making it heard more widely and strongly."

Just weeks after returning from a visit to the ITF in London and meetings with union leaders in Brussels, Osanloo, 47, was attacked and snatched from a bus by unidentified assailants on 10 July. Despite desperate pleas by his family and friends the authorities denied all knowledge of the attack and his whereabouts for two days, after which Revolutionary Court Judge Saeed Mortazavi finally changed his story and admitted that he was being held without charge in Evin prison. Since then he has been denied legal and medical visits, despite problems with an eye wound he suffered in a previous attack.

Immediately after the abduction the international trade union movement mobilised to support him and firstly to force the Iranian authorities to acknowledge that it was their agents who had taken him, and then to secure his release.

Osanloo has fought back against a prolonged Iranian government campaign of arrests and violence and has been snatched and gravely assaulted before by both police and men from the Iranian security services. The leader of the Syndicate of Workers of Tehran and Suburbs Bus Company (Sherkat-e Vahed), he was brought to Britain in June by the ITF to address trade unionists from around the world about the union's struggle. He then travelled to Brussels to meet the ITUC and other world trade union leaders.

(See http://www.itfglobal.org/urban-transport/tehranbuses.cfm for a history of the union's struggles or ITF press releases at http://www.itfglobal.org/press-area/index.cfm ).

ENDS

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