Launched in 2015 by a group of young IT experts during a conference organised by the then-Ministry of Information and Communications Technology (ICT), Arvan Cloud is a Tehran-based IT enterprise which its primary focus lies in delivering cloud and CDN servers.

On 14 November 2022, the Council of the European Union adopted restrictive measures against Arvan Cloud for its support of the Iranian government’s activities to control access to the Iranian intranet. Subsequently, on 22 June 2023, the U.S. Department of the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) designated the company, along with its two senior employees, Pouya Pirhosseinloo (co-founder and CEO) and Farhad Fatemi (co-founder, tech lead, and senior site reliability engineer), as well as an affiliated company based in the United Arab Emirates. This action was taken due to their involvement in facilitating the Iranian regime’s censorship of the Internet in Iran.

Adding to the international response, on 13 September 2023, Australia also designated Arvan Cloud,11 and on 25 September 2023, the UK government sanctioned the company for providing technology instrumental in repressing the Iranian people.

By submitting ‘Under the Approving Gaze of Human Rights Violators’, Justice Beyond Borders asserts that Arvan Cloud has not only been complicit in the systematic and widespread violation of the human rights of the Iranian people in the past, but the effects of its conduct persist and continue to impact the present.

The evidence examined in this submission, tested against legal principles, confirms the complicity of Arvan Cloud in implementing grave human rights violations. Arvan Cloud has enabled the Islamic Republic of Iran (IRI) by facilitating the intranet idea, advancing Iran’s disconnection from the world, and reducing the cost of internet shutdown for the government. Based on this conclusion, Justice Beyond Borders recommends that Arvan Cloud and its executives must remain listed as human rights violators in any upcoming review by the sanctioning authorities in the EU, US, UK, and Australia.