50 arrested for attending party in Iran

– Some 50 young men and women have been arrested by the Iranian regime’s suppressive security forces in the city of Dezful, south-west Iran, for attending a mixed-gender party.

The young men and women were celebrating late on Sunday and in the early hours on Monday in a garden in the suburbs of Dezful when they were rounded up by the regime’s suppressive forces.

Those arrested were 26 women and 24 men, and all of them were between 20 and 25 years of age.

“These people went to a garden in Dezful’s Shams-Abad district and began to celebrate in a mixed-gender and inappropriate fashion and the level of noise they made from having fun was to such an extent that the police were alerted,” the state-run Fars news agency reported.

They were arrested in the early hours on Monday and transferred to a police detention center.

All those detained had travelled from the nearby city of Ahwaz to join the garden party.

There has been a surge in the level of arrests of youths attending parties in Iran in recent months. Humiliating punishments and executions are among other violations of human rights in Iran since Hassan Rouhani took office at President in 2013. These rights abuses are aimed at spreading fear and intimidating the public, particularly the youth, to prevent social unrest.

The United Nations special rapporteur on the human rights situation in Iran has said that the general human rights situation, and in particular the repression of Iranian women and activists, has worsened since Rouhani became President.

More than 1,800 men and women have been executed in Iran during Rouhani's tenure.

Iranian Resistance's President-elect Maryam Rajavi in June described the unprecedented escalation of arbitrary, mass executions across Iran as an indication of the ruling regime's despair in the face of irremediable social and political crises and its fear of broad-based social discontent.

Mrs. Rajavi said: "The international community's silence and inaction over the systematic brutalities and abuses in Iran with the excuse of nuclear negotiations or else, tramples upon humanitarian values and human rights and further emboldens Iran’s religious fascist regime in slaughtering the populace and continuing its efforts to acquire the nuclear bomb and export fundamentalism and terrorism."