Reports have come in that Dr. Ahmadreza Djalali, a scholar of disaster medicine at Karolinska Institutet in Sweden, has been sentenced to death in Iran. While visiting Iran to attend academic workshops in 2016, he was arrested and in late 2017 was sentenced to death on charges of espionage.
Dalarna University is a strong supporter of academic freedom and views international collaboration and the exchange of non-violent, lawful ideas as fundamental to academic life. It strongly supports the European University Association's call to dismiss the death sentence of Dr. Djalali and to have him released from prison.
Dr. Djalali holds permanent residency in Sweden and has affiliations with both Stockholm's Karolinska Institutet and Italy's University of Eastern Piedmont. His work is global and has focussed on improving the capacity of hospitals in impoverised countries and countries that have experienced disaster and armed conflict.