Nobel laureates demand release of Iranian scholar facing death sentence


Source: Nature



Some 75 Nobel prizewinners have called on the Iranian government to release Ahmadreza Djalali, a researcher in disaster medicine who was sentenced to death last month. The letter is the latest and most powerful protest against the ruling by the scientific community so far.

The group wrote to Gholamali Khoshroo, the Iranian ambassador to the United Nations, on 17 November, and the letter was made public on 21 November. The Nobel laureates express their concern for the conditions of Djalali’s detention; they deem his trial “unfair” and “flawed”, and they urge the Iranian authorities to let him return to Sweden, where he lived.

The list includes prominent names such as Harold Varmus, a former director of the US National Institutes of Health, now at the Weill Cornell Medicine institute in New York, and Andre Geim, a physicist based at the University of Manchester, UK. They wrote: “As members of a group of people and organizations who, according to the will of Alfred Nobel are deeply committed to the greatest benefit to mankind, we cannot stay silent, when the life and work of a similarly devoted researcher as Iranian disaster medicine scholar Ahmadreza Djalali is threatened by a death sentence.”



Cont’d.

LINK:
http://www.nature.com/news/nobel-laureates-demand-release-of-iranian-scholar-facing-death-sentence-1.23037