According to Spiegel Online, about four thousand of total six thousands asylum seekers in Turkey are believed to be Iranian journalists, students and human-rights activists who fled Iran during the post-election clampdown last year.

Shahrzad News: There are currently more than six thousand Iranian refugees in Turkey, anxiously waiting for visas for EU countries, living in fear of their lives. The Iranian regime’s secret service agents and spies operate freely in the neighbouring country.

According to the German website Spiegel Online, about four thousand of these asylum seekers are believed to be Iranian journalists, students and human-rights activists who fled Iran during the post-election clampdown last year. Iran-aktuell, a Germany-based organisation that documents human rights abuses in Iran, says most of them left with very little, in some cases just the clothes they were wearing. One year on their fate is still in the hands of European governments who have yet to respond to their appeals for political asylum status.

The issue is being discussed by the Green and Social Democrat parties in Germany, and Dusseldorf City Council has offered citizenship to fifty of them. A spokesman for the Pro-Aziel refugee centre in Assen says other European city councils should follow Dusseldorf’s example and accept limited numbers of Iranian refugees, in a show of support for Iran’s pro-democracy and human rights movements. Meanwhile the Turkish government says that legally speaking it can only allow refugees to leave the country if they are officially accepted by a third state.