Thank you very much for your question.

I think, as Dr. Shaheed said, the Iranian regime is trying to limit the space available to the Iranian people, especially young Iranians, as much as possible, to deny them physical space by persecution, incarceration, torture, and a crackdown on different newspapers and publications, but they're also quite active in cyberspace.

We have to realize the Iranian regime is ultimately an analogue regime operating in the digital world. It's a regime that is very similar to the Soviet Union's regime, which is very good at interfering with shortwave radios, shutting down newspapers, and jailing people, but when it comes to social media, to Internet digital technology, the people of Iran are always one step ahead of them.

In our initiatives, which are mostly online initiatives, we are trying to provide that cyberspace to Iranian activists and civil society. As Dr. Shaheed correctly noted, Iranian civil society is physically restricted, but there is a very vibrant and very lively dialogue going on in cyberspace and that has an inevitable effect on the physical civil society discourse as well.

One of the initiatives that we started about two years ago was education is not a crime, which is a campaign for the rights of the Baha'i religious minority to study and teach in universities. As you know, Baha'is cannot teach or study in a university. I made a documentary film called To Light a Candle. Then we made that documentary available online in Persian for anyone who wanted to download it. From what we know, and of course we cannot have any official statistics, different groups of people download that film and watch it together.

Also, we had another international campaign last year on the last Friday of February in almost 400 cities around the world from New Zealand to Hawaii. They watched the film on the same night. The campaign is still going on. In the second phase of the campaign we want to create murals and graffiti all around the world, again with the help of citizens, not only Baha'is or Iranians, but other people, to raise awareness about this issue.

With journalism is not a crime, the website is available for Iranian journalists to be in touch with each other. As I mentioned in my testimony, many people around the world do not know the names and faces of these Iranian journalists. They're just statistics: 45, 56, 65. They don't mean anything, so we are trying to document every person who's been in prison in Iran. We started in 2009 and right now we have a wall of shame. The website is going to be revamped, and we're going to have different events around the world with different festivals.

We also provide psychological and legal counselling to journalists. When people are arrested, they do not know their legal rights. When their belongings are confiscated, they do not know whether it is legal or not. In the interrogation room the interrogator can mention different articles of the constitution and they do not know that. We are providing legal counselling, both for the journalists and for the families of journalists to refer to, but lawyers are also available to give counselling.

There are many other “is not a crime” topics. As you know, they arrested some young people who were dancing to the song Happy. Maybe young people know the Happy song by Pharrell Williams, so we have made a website for happiness is not a crime.

The last one is “being a dog is not a crime”, which in a few days has gained 5,600 followers on Facebook, because the inhumane treatment by the Iranian government goes beyond people. Stray dogs are killed on the streets of different cities across Iran. We think, and I think the majority of young Iranians think, that life has to be respected. That's why they have reacted positively to our campaign.

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