Website of Kourosh Ziabari, award-winning journalist and reporter

Kourosh Ziabari - ODVV: Saudi Arabia has recently been severely reprimanded over its human rights violations by international organisations, mostly the Human Rights Watch, which has offered a disappointing picture of the situation in this country. Aside from its heavy involvement in the wars in Yemen and Bahrain, Saudi Arabia is still failing in several areas, including in criminal justice, women's and girl's rights and migrant workers. It's reported that over 9 million migrant workers fill manual, clerical and service jobs in the Persian Gulf country, constituting more than half of the workforce, but many of them suffer different sorts of abuse and exploitation, "amounting to conditions of forced labour." In January 2018, UN human...

Kourosh Ziabari - International Policy Digest: Arts and culture can bridge the gaps between nations in times of division or when political tensions arise and daily life is difficult. When leaders exchange verbally aggressive words or believe that their national security interests are threatened, it is the authors, artists, entrepreneurs, academicians and even students who bear the burden of eradicating enmity and eliminating hostilities between countries. Keyvan Shovir is a young Iranian visual and street artist who combines Iranian traditional culture with contemporary pop culture in his art to showcase the beauty of Iran to those who are unfamiliar with its people and culture. Shovir is credited with being a pioneer in Iranian...

Kourosh Ziabari - Stony Brook Independent: Cinema is a thriving industry in Iran. It has always been a platform for the artistic dissemination of thoughts and ideas that cannot make their way to the state TV, be summarized in articles in newspapers or discussed in one-sided talk shows. Iranian cinema has been punctually winning a sad and dejected nation honor and pride in difficult and taxing days. It is well-known in our part of the world that good work and reliable products sometimes emerge under intensities and difficulties. Iranian cinema is no exception in being an industry, which has often made progress under pressure, restrictions and limitations. Junk cinema Despite boasting of names such as Asghar Farhadi, even Iranian...

Kourosh Ziabari - ODVV: On 27 January 2017, U.S. President Donald Trump issued the executive order 13769, blocking the entry of the nationals of seven Muslim-majority countries into the United States on security grounds. The executive order, popularly referred to as the Muslim ban was challenged by several courts. Many lawyers, legal experts and Congressmen voiced their protest against it. However, the third version of the ban signed by President Trump on 24th September 2017 still prevents the citizens of the seven countries from traveling to America unless in exceptional circumstances. Its immediate effect was that 700 travellers were detained and up to 60,000 visas were provisionally revoked. Findings by Haas Institute reveal...

Kourosh Ziabari - International Policy Digest: Working with children with autism is a challenge that few people embrace pro bono. Autism is a developmental disorder marked by difficulties with social interaction and communication, and by restricted and repetitive behavior. Stereotyped behavior, compulsive behavior, ritualistic behavior, restricted interests and self-injury, problems in social development and communication are the major characteristics of children with autism, and absent support, these challenges can present long-term challenges for individuals. Melissa Diamond is an American social entrepreneur, community worker and writer who has founded and is the executive director of the organisation A Global Voice for...

Kourosh Ziabari - International Policy Digest: The March 2018 presidential election in Egypt decided that the incumbent Abdel Fattah el-Sisi will be in office for another four years. Many human rights groups, critics and journalists described the poll as “farcical,” saying that Sisi cannot be the true representation of Egyptian democracy. Abdel Fattah el-Sisi had no serious rivals but only a mid-ranking politician who was himself a Sisi supporter. Moussa Moustafa Moussa was able to win no more than of 2.92% of the votes. The Civil Democratic Movement boycotted the election and there were allegations of electoral fraud. Nezar AlSayyad, an Egyptian historian and the former head of the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at the...

Kourosh Ziabari - International Policy Digest: Thanks to a royal decree, Saudi women will be allowed to drive cars and motorbikes beginning in June this year. The decision to give the women in Saudi Arabia the right to drive was announced in September 2017 by King Salman and is considered a major step in the course of the normalisation of life in Saudi Arabia, a highly-conservative kingdom in which women have very limited rights and almost no representation in major decision-makings. A patriarchal society in which women are sometimes even treated as commodities with no role to play in social and political walks of life, Saudi Arabia has been incomprehensibly resistant to such changes as giving women the right to drive. Saudi Arabia...

Kourosh Ziabari - Medium: I chose an early career in journalism by virtue of my journalist family: my parents have been running a local weekly magazine in northern Iran for some 20 years now. Although I can’t say that I regret my choice of becoming a journalist, I should confess this industry has hit a stalemate in my country and those who remain committed to it are almost automatically following the advice embedded in one of the famous poems by Rumi, a 13th century Iranian Sunni poet and jurist who said, “I am not to give away your painful feeling; Or to quit loving you till the day I’m kneeling. Your only souvenir is a whole lot of hurting; Still, I won’t replace it with a certain healing.” Aside from not being well-paid,...

Kourosh Ziabari - Medium: It’s been three years since Iran and the six world powers came to an agreement to solve the longstanding controversy surrounding Iran’s nuclear program. The nuclear deal that was signed in July 2015 was what the international community was looking for for so long. It was the concrete translation of vague and abstract ideals that everybody knew what they were, but couldn’t be actualised for several reasons, mostly political intransigence. Iran deal, according to the Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif, was an agreement that was supposed to be the manifestation of a zero-sum game, and even for President Obama, it was a victory. India was one of many countries that reaped major benefits from the lifting of...

Kourosh Ziabari - Stony Brook Independent: It is difficult to give a vivid picture of Iran’s media and their popularity through figures and statistics. Few studies have been done in this regard, and Iran’s media, including state TV broadcasters and radio stations, newspapers, news agencies and online publications have hardly been successful in surpassing their London or Los Angeles-based competitors in satisfying the varying needs of their audience and their thirst for professional coverage, honesty, fair and accurate reporting and “good news.” It is arguable that Iran’s media have failed the test of legitimacy, as excessive intervention on behalf of the government to manipulate the media content and influence their coverage...

Kourosh Ziabari - ODVV: Jane Elliott is a distinguished American former third-grade school-teacher, anti-racism activist, feminist and educationalist. She is known for implementing an exercise called "Blue Eyes/Brown Eyes" in a classroom of third-graders in Riceville, Iowa, to figure out how racist her students were and gauge the amount of racial prejudice towards otheres among her young pupils. The highly-controversial test created divisions among the townspeople and made her a national icon of fight against racism. She did the exercise one day after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. and her initiative became the basis of much of what is now known as "diversity training". She introduced this method to firms in the U.S.,...

Kourosh Ziabari - Medium: April is a month in which children have many reasons to celebrate and many reasons to expect to be listened to, taken care of and treated more respectfully, fondly and amicably. April 2, which was last Monday, marks the International Children’s Book Day, which is an International Observance. Then many countries such as Bolivia, Haiti, Zambia, Mexico, Peru, Colombia, Palestine and Hong Kong, Taiwan mark national Children’s Day to celebrate children and discuss the important things that relate to their welfare and wellbeing, mental and physical health, and raise public awareness of their needs, including the need for a robust, frank and unaltered dialogue between children and their parents without any...