There are a couple of depressing developments to report from the fraught world of Iranian blogs. I had an email from author N Alavi, who wrote a feature for Guardian Unlimited on Iranian blogs back in December, saying: "It seems that suddenly a community's struggle for free speech against all odds has come to standstill and most bloggers cannot even access their own weblogs."
Apparently, the country's ISPs have been ordered to filter blogging services, including Blogger and PersianBlog, as well as the social networking site Orkut.
The man largely credited with kickstarting the blog revolution in Iran, Hossein Derakshan, wrote on Thursday last week about the way blogging services were being blocked.
On the same day, Human Rights Watch said that it was concerned for the safety of a group of Iranian journalists who "received death threats from judicial officials under Tehran chief prosecutor Saeed Mortazavi" after they testified about torture and mistreatment while they were detained by the government:
The journalists' testimonies exposed Mortazavi's role in authorising their torture to extract confessions and in compelling them to appear on television to deny their mistreatment while under detention. [...] Since their appearances before the commission, Saeed Mortazavi, chief prosecutor of Tehran, has threatened each of these former detainees with lengthy prison sentences and harm to their family members, as punishment for their testimony.
Mortazavi continues to issue numerous subpoenas for the journalists without specifying charges. His operatives also harass the journalists by phone on a daily basis. On January 3, Mortazavi held a press conference denying any mistreatment of detainees and threatening to prosecute the former detainees for "allegations against security forces and prison officials that are politically motivated".
Persian Students in the UK, a group blog, has helpfully translated a post from Webneveshteha, a blog written by Mohammad Ali Abtahi, former vice-president of parliamentary affairs, which provides more details of the testimony of journalists Hanif Mazroi, Massoud Ghoreishi, Fereshteh Ghazi and others.
Today, Derakhshan notes on his other English language blog, BBC Persian's report that the very same man - Saeed Mortazavi - had "directly ordered the major ISPs (or ICPs, as they call them in Iran) to filter Orkut and blogging service websites".
"Now it seems that Saeed Mortazavi, Tehran's chief prosecutor, is willing to directly control and influence the major ISPs," he says.
The bloggers and journalists are fighting back, however, despite the risk of harassment and worse. N Alavi writes: "Bloggers have been taken aback by this sudden assault; but some are trying to come up with ways to break the filters, while others are starting online petitions. Yesterday a group of Bloggers wrote an open letter to [Mortazavi]."
Toronto-based student Bahman Kalbazi writes about the petition on his blog, World Citizen.
