Ali-Akbar Mousavi Khoeini

Ali-Akbar Mousavi Khoeini

Ali Akbar Mousavi Khoeini  pronunciation  (Persian: علی اکبر موسوی خویینی‎‎) (also known as Seyed Ali Akbar Mosavi) is a notable Iranian human rights activist and politician. He was an active member of Tahkim vahdat before he was elected as a Member of Parliament in the 6th Parliament of Iran. In the parliament, he made a significant attempt to defend the rights of political prisoners during the 1990s. He is currently the president of Advar Tahkim Vahdat.

Biography

Mousavi Khoeini started his political career as an activist in the Islamic Students Association of Khajeh Nasir University. Students in "Islamic Associations" are the biggest pro-democracy student groups in the universities in Iran. He was later elected to be a member of Adver Tahkim Vahdat, a representative body of Islamic Students Associations in Iran.

In 1999, he was elected to the Majlis of Iran (Iranian Parliament) from the district of Tehran. He along with Fatemeh Haghighatjoo, Ali Tajernia and others started the student faction in the parliament. They followed up the demands of student activists within the parliament. They initiated a sit-in in the parliament in support of jailed students, which resulted in many of them getting freed by the regime.

Mousavi Khoeini also helped form a committee in the parliament to visit the prisons and report on the condition of the imprisoned activists. He was able to uncover a number of secret facilities that were used to keep the political activists in very poor conditions. He also tried to provide ways of financial support for families of imprisoned political activists.

For the first time in the history of Islamic Republic, he pressed the Majles Khobregan (the body which selects the supreme leader for lifetime) to produce a report on the performance of the supreme leader.

He also founded Sazeman-e Danesh Amokhtegan-e Iran (Iran Students Alumni Organization) to defend human rights of students, women, prisoners, and minorities. This led to his involvement with the demonstration of women in June in support of women's rights in Iran. He was arrested during this protest on June 12, 2006 in Haft-e Tir Square in Tehran and was put in solitary confinement. He was released on bail on Oct 22, 2006 in part due to the efforts of Akbar Ganji, the well known Iranian political activist recently released from jail, who launched a mass-hunger strike campaign to free Mosavi from jail.

Mousiva Khoeini currently resides in Washington DC (source: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/19/world/middleeast/19iran.html).

External links

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