Zeynab Jalalian, a Kurdish political prisoner detained in Iran who has been serving a life sentence for 17 years, is not receiving medical treatment despite her deteriorating health, reported the human rights organization HRANA, citing information from the prisoner's family.

Jalalian suffers from various health problems as a result of poor prison conditions and mistreatment in Iranian prisons. In addition to heart disease and impaired vision, she is partially paralyzed and struggles with intestinal and kidney disease as well as chronic tooth and jaw infections, which severely impair her ability to eat and swallow.

According to HRANA, Jalalian underwent a final medical examination last fall. The medical staff recommended appropriate treatment at an outside hospital, but prison authorities in Yazd refused to transfer her. “This situation heightens her family's concern for her health,” HRANA said.

Zeynab Jalalian was born in 1982 in a village near Maku and became involved in the women's rights movement in Iran at an early age. In the spring of 2008, she was arrested in Kermanshah and severely tortured for eight months in a facility run by the Iranian Ministry of Intelligence before being sentenced to death in an unfair show trial for “enmity against God” on charges of membership in the Party for a Free Life in Kurdistan (PJAK). Following international protests, Jalalian's death sentence was commuted to life imprisonment in 2011. She is currently the only female prisoner in Iran serving this sentence. In recent years, Jalalian has also been repeatedly blackmailed by the regime into signing a pre-written “statement of repentance.” In return, she was promised medical treatment and even conditional release, which she refused.