Silencing Zanan Condemned

Reporters Without Borders today condemned a decision by Iran’s Commission for Press Authorization and Surveillance on 28 January to suspend the feminist monthly Zanan, Iran’s leading women’s magazine, for “publishing information detrimental to society's psychological tranquility.”

“The Commission for Press Authorization and Surveillance is the judiciary's right arm in its crusade against news media that stray from the official line,” Reporters Without Borders said. “It has been responsible for the suspension of many publications which the courts subsequently close down for good, often imprisoning their journalists. In Iran, the right to information is still seen as a threat to national security.”