Guardian Unlimited: The Guardian’s Tehran correspondent, Robert Tait, has been expelled from Iran without explanation after nearly three years of reporting from the country.
The Guardian
The Guardian’s Tehran correspondent, Robert Tait, has been expelled from Iran without explanation after nearly three years of reporting from the country.
Tait was forced to leave the country after the Iranian authorities declined to renew his visa and residence permit, despite an appeal on his behalf from the Guardian’s editor, Alan Rusbridger, to Iran’s culture and Islamic guidance ministry, which supervises the activities of all foreign and domestic media. He is now back in the UK, along with his Iranian wife.
The ministry gave no reason for its decision but said the newspaper was free to propose another journalist as its correspondent in Iran.
Tait, 43, was originally ordered to leave the country in March after officials expressed displeasure over his reporting. He was allowed to remain after the Guardian successfully appealed for his residence permit to be renewed.
He is the second British journalist to be expelled from Iran in the past six months. Angus McDowall, a correspondent for the Independent, left last July after his documentation was not renewed. McDowall’s expulsion was also unexplained but he had been detained after inadvertently entering a forbidden military zone during a driving holiday.
Tait was the last British journalist working in Iran for an English language newspaper. Several other newspapers employ local English-speaking Iranians, often because of difficulties in obtaining resident press credentials for foreign nationals.
The expulsion comes amid a general crackdown on press freedom in Iran. Several newspapers and websites critical of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s hardline government have been closed over the past year, while those remaining have been forced to resort to self-censorship for fear of crossing officially decreed “red lines”. Several Iranian journalists have been detained in recent months for a range of offences, including publishing “lies”.
Two other Guardian correspondents were expelled from Iran. Geneive Abdo left in 2001 and was later told she would not be allowed to return following an unauthorised interview with Akbar Ganji, a dissident then being held in Tehran’s Evin prison. Dan De Luce was expelled in 2004 after reporting from the earthquake-damaged city of Bam without official permission.
