US slaps sanctions on Iranian officials for barring candidates

WASHINGTON: The United States on Thursday slapped sanctions on five Iranian officials in charge of vetting candidates for this week´s parliamentary elections, in which thousands have been barred from running.

The targeted officials include Ahmad Jannati, a powerful cleric accused of overseeing the disqualification of candidates as part of the Guardian Council. The ultra-conservative also plays a key role in a body that selects the regime´s supreme leader. “The Trump Administration will not tolerate the manipulation of elections to favor the regime´s malign agenda, and this action exposes those senior regime officials responsible for preventing the Iranian people from freely choosing their leaders,” Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said in a statement.

Iranian headscarf campaigner calls for vote boycott: Anti-headscarf campaigner Shaparak Shajarizadeh once believed in the potential for change in Iran but is now so despondent she is calling for a boycott of Friday´s parliamentary elections in the Islamic Republic.

Shajarizadeh became a dissident in 2018 when she was arrested for repeatedly removing her headscarf in public and waving it on the end of a stick, as part of a women´s rights protest that caused a social media storm. “The Iranian people lost their hopes... I was among those who had some hopes. But now it is like choosing between bad and worse,” the 44-year-old women´s rights campaigner told AFP in Geneva, where she was attending an annual conference for human rights activists. Shajarizadeh said the supposed political choice in Iran between reformist and conservative politicians was like picking between “two faces of the same coin”. Thousands of reformist and moderate candidates are in any case being barred from contesting the elections — something that critics say could turn the vote into a choice between conservatives and ultra-conservatives. Iranians “lost their hopes,” particularly after a bloody crackdown last year on fuel-price protests, she said. Shajarizadeh calls President Hassan Rohani, who was first elected in 2013 and again in 2017 and was once seen as a possible force for change, a “so-called reformer”.