The offices of two human rights groups headed by Iran’s only Nobel laureate remained closed Monday, a day after Iranian security forces raided the building and briefly took Shirin Ebadi into custody, she told CNN.
Ebadi said Iranian authorities have not given her an explanation for the crackdown, although both the non-governmental organizations had been operating without a government permit.

Security forces raided a building in Tehran Sunday that housed the Center for Participation in Clearing Mine Areas, which helps victims of landmines in Iran, and the Defenders of Human Rights Center, which reports human rights violations in Iran, defends political prisoners, and supports those prisoners’ families.

Ebadi heads both NGOs and funds them with her 2003 Nobel Peace Prize earnings.

The raid reportedly took place as the Defenders of Human Rights Center planned a belated celebration of the 60th anniversary of the U.N.’s Human Rights Day.

The center had invited several hundred people to attend Sunday’s event, but Iranian security forces who shut down the building blocked them from entering, according to Etemad-e-Melli, a reformist newspaper.

A spokesman for Iran’s government had no immediate information about the raid.
Some of Iran’s reformist newspapers reported on the incident, which was widely ignored by state-run media. Some reports said the offices were closed because the center did not have a permit for Sunday’s event.

But Etemad-e-Melli noted that Iranian rules and regulations allow gatherings without a permit if they are held in a closed and covered area.

Ebadi told CNN that Iranian authoritHTTP/1.1 200 OK Date: Wed, 10 Mar 2010 15:55:46 GMT Server: Apache X-Powered-By: PHP/5.3.1 X-Pingback: http://wonews.de/fa_blog/xmlrpc.php Connection: close Transfer-Encoding: chunked Content-Type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1

OK

The server encountered an internal error or misconfiguration and was unable to complete your request.

Please contact the server administrator, support@one.com and inform them of the time the error occurred, and anything you might have done that may have caused the error.

More information about this error may be available in the server error log.