Tehran _ Agencies
Iranian authorities have arrested an Iranian expert in population and fertility affairs on charges of working with foreign "spy networks", the official news agency reported Sunday.
The agency did not mention the details of the charges, but quoted a lawyer as saying that the defendant was Maimana Hosseini Shavoshi.
She works at the Faculty of Population Development and global health at the University of Melbourne. Articles on fertility policies and family planning in Iran have been widely disseminated.
The hardline newspaper (Kayhan) on Saturday published a report on the arrest of a number of "activists... Who take scientific activities cover to penetrate government bodies ".
They manipulated the statistics and delivered sensitive information to the enemies of Iran as part of the country´s "cultural and social invasion" efforts, she said.
Iran has previously been an international success story in controlling the population as the birth rate fell from seven children per woman during the 1980s to 1, 66 in 2016, according to World Bank figures.
In 2000, former Iranian health minister Alireza Merdi received the United Nations Population Award for his family planning initiative in the Islamic Republic, where birth control is a thorny issue.
Shavoshi wrote a lot about these efforts, which she described as the "fastest drop in fertility ever".
However, the Iranian authorities later warned that they had exceeded their targets, with the number of births falling below the desired rate to maintain population growth.
In 2012, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei said that his country had made a mistake in continuing to adopt family planning policies in the 1990s, calling for measures to double the population to 150 million people.
"The enemies of Iran are using population experts to confront recent efforts by reducing the severity of the current population crisis," Kayhan said.
A member of the Cultural Committee stated in
"There is evidence that these people are linked to Western spy networks," said Iranian Parliament cultural committee member Nasrullah Bejamankar.
