Mohammad Seddigh Kaboudvand

Mohammad Seddigh Kaboudvand (also spelled Mohammad Sadiq Kabudvand, ), born on 22 March 1962 is an Iranian Kurdish activist and journalist. He was the editor of Payam-e Mardom. He is also the founder of the Kurdistan Human Rights Organization HROK (Rêxistina Mafê Mirovan li Kurdistanê in Kurdish).

He was arrested in June 2007 and sentenced to ten or eleven years in prison on charges linked to his human rights work, journalism, and advocacy on behalf of political prisoners. During his imprisonment in Evin Prison, he was held for months in solitary confinement, suffered serious health problems including a stroke and heart attacks, and was reportedly beaten by prison guards before his release in May 2017.

He has received international recognition for his work, including the British Press Award for International Journalist of the Year in 2009 and Human Rights Watch's Hellman/Hammett Award for persecuted writers.

Early life and family Mohammad Seddigh Kaboudvand was born on 22 March 1962 in Divandarreh, in Sanandaj County, in Eastern Kurdistan. He was the fourth child in his family and has two brothers and three sisters. Kaboudvand spent his childhood and youth in the city of Sanandaj, and at the age of twenty, after marrying, he moved to Tehran, the capital of Iran. He has two sons and one daughter.

Career In 1996, he founded "Unity for Democracy", a movement that sought to advance democracy in Iranian Kurdish society and published an internal bulletin, The Voice of Freedom, which was forced to shut down after a year.

In 2003, after a five-year effort to secure official permission, he launched the Persian and Kurdish weekly Payam-e mardom-e Kurdistan ("The Messenger of the People of Kurdistan") and served as its editor in chief until the Sanandaj court suspended it on 27 June 2004 on accusations of promoting separatist ideas and publishing false news, according to Reporters Without Borders. At the same time, he and three other journalists were threatened with arrest on charges of disturbing public opinion and promoting separatist ideas. HROK had about 100 members. Despite a long-running application, the authorities never recognized it officially as a non-governmental organization. Its stated aims included defending fundamental rights such as those affirmed in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and international conventions, promoting knowledge of and respect for human rights in Kurdistan, and fostering friendly relations among the peoples of Iran on the basis of legal equality. HROK was later declared illegal.

He was sentenced to ten His condition deteriorated further, and in April 2008 he had a stroke and was taken to a specialist for treatment.

Security forces told Kaboudvand in 2013 that they might bring new charges over letters he was said to have sent to senior officials urging respect for human rights. No such charges had been filed by late 2014.

Kaboudvand was released on 12 May 2017 after ten years' incarceration in Tehran's Evin Prison.

After detention In 2019, two years after his release, Kaboudvand wrote on Twitter that pressure on him and his family was continuing. He said that after ten years in prison, his family had been left economically devastated and that he remained deprived of social, civil, and professional rights, adding that he had also been placed on a no-fly list.

In 2009, Kaboudvand received the International Journalist of the Year award at the British Press Awards and was also given Human Rights Watch's Hellman/Hammett Award for persecuted writers.

In December 2014, he received an award from the International Center for Human Rights in recognition of his work defending the rights of Kurds in Iran and neighbouring countries.