On Sunday, January 3, five important religious intellectuals issued a joint statement in which they declared their full support for the leaders of the Green Movement in Iran, and listed ten demands that they believe must be met in order to get the country out of deep crisis. The ten demands include the five that Mousavi had already listed and are, in fact, practically identical with what he had listed in his Statement No. 13.

The five signatories are Dr. Ali Akbar Soroush, the distinguished Islamic scholar; Dr. Mohsen Kadivar, a student of Grand Ayatollah Montazeri, a progressive cleric, and an outspoken critic of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei (for which he was jailed a few years ago); Akbar Ganji, the investigative journalist who was imprisoned for six years, Ataollah Mohajerani, former Majles [parliament] deputy and Minister of Culture and Islamic Guidance in the first Khatami administration (a short period Iran enjoyed a relatively free press), and Abdol-ali Bazargan, son of former Prime Minister Mehdi Bazargan, a well-known Islamic thinker.

The statement begins by declaring that,

Six months ago millions of Iranians demonstrated [peacefully] in the streets, in order to regain their rights that, through the treacherous elections, had been taken away from them, and to protest against all the insults and belittling by the government. The security and military establishment responded to the peaceful demands of the people violently and ruthlessly, and tried to prevent people from being present in the public domain and debate, and attempted to link the Green Movement with foreign powers and aligned with their policies.