Leading Australian universities have suspended travel to Iran by their staff with fears Australia’s closer ties to the US have led to increased risks for those travelling to the region.
The ban follows advice from the government that Australians may be at greater risk of detention if they undertook activities that “attract the attention of Iranian authorities.”
The federal government revealed last month that Kylie Moore-Gilbert, a Melbourne University academic who has published work on the 2011 Arab uprisings and on authoritarian regimes and who holds dual UK-Australian citizenship had been held at Tehran’s Evin prison for almost a year.
Earlier this month two travel bloggers Jolie King and her boyfriend Mark Firkin were released after 10 weeks in detention in Iran after Australia released the University of Queensland PhD student Reza Dehbashi. He had been detained in Queensland and faced the prospect of extradition to the US after being accused of exporting American equipment for detecting stealth planes or missiles to Iran.
Shahram Akbarzadeh, a specialist in Middle Eastern politics with Deakin University said until recently Iran had considered Australia a relatively benign nation, and while visitors from the United States and the United Kingdom were at risk of arbitrary detention, Australians had little to fear.
Read the article by Nick O’Malley in The Sydney Morning Herald.