Haleh Esfandiari, director of the Middle East Program at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, was freed and left Iran on September 4, 2007 to return to the United States. She had been detained in Tehran in December 2006 and arrested on May 8, 2007.

The Academy's Human Rights Committee for the Human Rights of Scientists wrote the following letter on her behalf.

June 19th, 2007

His Excellency Mahmoud Ahmadinejad
President of the Islamic Republic of Iran
The Presidency, Palestine Avenue, Azerbaijan Intersection
Tehran, Islamic Republic of Iran

Your Excellency,

I am writing to you as the chairman of the Human Rights Committee of the New York Academy of Sciences to ask for the release of Haleh Esfandiari, the director of the Middle East Program at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, DC, and a dual Iranian-American National, who was detained in Tehran in December 2006, during a visit to her 93 year old mother, and arrested on May 8th and incarcerated in the Evin Prison.

We are adding our voices to those of hundreds of other scientists, scholars, and academics around the world who have expressed their concern for her safety and well-being. We call on the Iranian government to ensure that she has immediate access to legal council, to family, and to any necessary medical treatment.

Dr. Esfandiari is a distinguished scholar, in her writings and in the programs that she organized at the Wilson Center, she worked to facilitate dialogue and discourse on major isssues in Middle Eastern countries, including Iran.

I am sure that you appreciate that the free exchange of ideas across national boundaries is a core value of academic freedom and higher education generally and should be respected.

Let me, again, express our concern about Dr. Esfandiari's detention and my hope that this matter can be resolved as promptly as possible.

Sincerely,

Eugene Chudnovsky
Chairman, Committee on Human Rights of Scientists