Post #6 Iranian Authorities Arrest Filmmaker Who Supported Opposition

Click here to read the New York Times article "Iran Arrests Filmmaker Who Backed Opposition", written on March 2nd.
Prominent Iranian filmmaker Jaffar Panahi, along with his wife, daughter and 15 other guests, were arrested last Tuesday.
Panahi has supported the opposition movement in Iran, as well as having had appeared at international film festivals outside of Iran wearing a green scarf, which is considered the trademark colour of the opposition party.
Prosecutor General Abbas Jafari Dowlatabadi said that Panahi had been arrested for committing "certain offenses" that were not related to his "profession or politics" but did not elaborate on any more specifics.
Panahi's arrest is the latest in what appears to be a pattern of arrests by the government in which they arrest prominent figures who support the opposition movement. Last December, Shahram Nazeri, a famous singer was briefly detained, and in January, Mehraneh Atashi, a well-known photographer and her husband were arrested with no explanation given for their arrests.
Iran is reported to have released a dozen detainees last monday, in order to relieve some pressure from human rights activists. But it is also believed that a huge number of people are still held within the prison system for dissent again the government. The Human Rights Activists News Agency reported that five followers of the Bahai faith were sentenced to ten-months in prison for spreading "propaganda against the regime."
Also on Tuesday, one of the 20,000 people arrested in Tehran on February 11, when the government stopped an opposition rally, gave new insight into his capture. The prisoner said that he was held "with 50 others, in a 130-square-foot cell where he said his cellmates were ruthlessly beaten."
This relates to what we've been learning in Comparative Government largely in terms of legitimacy and citizen's rights. If the Iranian Government continues to arrest people for no reason, or simply for disagreeing with the government, the country's legitimacy is bound to falter, which will also occur if the citizens are beaten when they are arrested, as reported by one of the prisoners.

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