Human rights group calls on Iranian authorities to release student demonstrators

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ASSOCIATED PRESS
3:53 a.m. July 8, 2004

CAIRO, Egypt – Iranian authorities should release student protesters detained in violent demonstrations at Tehran University that began five years ago Thursday, a New York-based human rights group said.
Human Rights Watch said that an unknown number of students remained in custody out of the thousands it claimed were initially arrested. One student died during the demonstrations.

"Five years after the Tehran University protests, it's time for the Iranian government to release the peaceful protesters," Sarah Leah Whitson, executive director of Human Rights Watch Middle East and North Africa Division, said in a statement.

"The government also needs to hold plainclothes militia accountable for the attacks on students that year."

Security forces raided a student dormitory following a peaceful demonstration, the statement said, beating students and trapping many in their rooms. The demonstrations lasted for a week, involving more than 25,000 people.

Human Rights Watch said several students had been sentenced to death, but authorities later commuted their punishments to time in prison. It also accused Iranian security authorities of torturing many imprisoned students and preventing them from seeing their lawyers.

"While many of those initially detained were released, an unknown number of student protesters remain in prison," the group alleged.

The anniversary of the beginning of the 1999 protests is usually accompanied by student demonstrations against the country's hard-line authorities, which are controlled by ruling conservative Shiite Muslim clerics.

Subsequent protests marking the 1999 demonstrations, which were the biggest and most violent anti-government action since the 1979 Islamic revolution that installed the Islamic regime, have been met by crackdowns by Iranian authorities