January Action to #SaveAhmad

SAIH is deeply concerned about Dr. Ahmadreza Djalali, a scholar of disaster medicine who is facing execution in Iran, in apparent retaliation for refusing to spy on colleagues in Europe.

Dr. Djalali was originally arrested in April 2016 while attending academic conferences in Iran, and was sentenced to death on October 21, 2017. He was found guilty of providing information to Israel to help it assassinate several senior nuclear scientists. The sentence was affirmed without appeal on December 9, 2017.

Dr. Djalali is affiliated with several European universities and is a permanent resident of Sweden, where his family currently resides.

“A physician and expert in disaster medicine, Dr. Djalali is a highly respected scientist who is well known and admired within the international community for his high quality research and teaching”, wrote Ole Petter Ottersen, Vice-Chancellor at Karolinska Institutet in Sweden, where Dr. Djalali completed his PhD.

Together with Amnesty International Sweden, Karolinska Institutet held a joint demonstration in support for the researcher last week.

As the Scholars At Risk Network (SAR) states, it is critical that we keep his name in the headlines and in the minds of state officials as much as possible, and call out on the international higher education community to voice its support. 

SAIH has telephoned Norway’s Iranian Embassy to urge his release. Throughout January, you can help spreading the word on social media by using #SaveAhmad, by for instance sending tweets to your Ministry of Foreign Affairs and/or Permanent Representative to UN: