Iran Reports Torture, Rights Abuses in its Prisons

July 24, 2005
The Associated Press
USA Today

TEHRAN, Iran -- In an unprecedented report, Iran's hard-line judiciary acknowledged widespread human rights violations in prisons, including the use of torture, state-run media reported Sunday.

The report said prison guards and officials in detention centers have ignored a legal order banning torture. It also said police have made several arrests without sufficient evidence and held suspects in undeclared detention centers.

The report, which was broadcast on state-run radio and appeared on the front page of several newspapers, said a judicial investigation had discovered human right violations including the "blindfolding and beating" of defendants, a 13-year-old boy jailed for stealing a hen, a woman who was imprisoned because her husband was a fugitive and a man who has been in prison since 1988 without a verdict in his case.

The report has been handed over to the head of judiciary Ayatollah Mahmoud Hashemi Shahroudi.

Abbas Ali Alizadeh, head of the Tehran Justice Administration, who drafted the report, said some detention centers run by the hard-line elite Revolutionary Guards had refused to admit inspectors or investigate whether prisoners' human rights were being respected.

Last year, Shahroudi ordered a ban on the use of torture for obtaining confessions — a move seen as Iran's first public acknowledgment of the practice.

Iran's constitution specifically outlaws torture, but human rights groups say the Islamic Republic's security forces routinely use it to extract confessions.

Iranian hard-liners have jailed several dozen reformist journalists and political activists and closed about 100 pro-democracy publications in the past five years for criticizing the rule of the country's unelected clerics.

In 2003, a special U.N. envoy visited Iran, during which he said he received "many complaints" regarding human rights violations, including torture, from pro-reform dissidents, writers and activists.

The bleak situation in Iranian prisons was highlighted by the case of Iranian-Canadian photojournalist Zahra Kazemi, who died in jail July 2003 about three weeks after being detained for taking photographs outside a Tehran prison during anti-government protests. Reformers said she was beaten to death.

Mahabad Crackdown Reaching New Proportions
July 24, 2005
Potkin Azarmehr
Iran va Jahan

Reports from Mahabad state the repression reaching new proportions even beyond what was the norm in the past. The strikes and protests in Mahabad are now in its eighth day. In the last few days the state security forces have attacked the homes of Mahabad citizens, and arrested hundreds of the population. It is rumoured in the town that two youth aged 13 and 18 have died under torture. Thirteen of the tortured are in such a critical state that they have been taken to the hospital which is under the control of the military units.

The city is now under complete general strike. Until 6:00 pm yesterday, large crowds had gathered outside the main prison demanding the return of the bodies of the murdered youth.

In solidarity with the people of Mahabad, the near by towns of Bookan, Saqiz, and Kamyaran have also joined the general strike.

While the new president, Ahmadi-Nejad, continues to flex his muscle, his crimes are going unreported. Not one Western correspondence as yet has gone to Mahabad to view the situation.



UK Issues Damning Report on Human Rights Abuses in Iran

July 24, 2005
Iran Focus
iranfocus

London -- Britain issued a damning report on the human rights situation in Iran, stating that there had been “no significant progress” over the year, while human rights had “deteriorated further in many areas”.

The British Foreign and Commonwealth Office wrote in its Human Rights Annual Report 2005, released on July 21, that punishment of children in the Islamic Republic was an “area of concern”, adding, “We have received an increasing number of reports of juvenile offenders being sentenced to death or lashing. In several instances, these barbarous punishments have apparently been carried out. A 16-year-old girl, Atefeh Rajabi, was reportedly hanged in public in August 2004 for ‘acts incompatible with chastity’”.

The FCO said that such punishments violated Iran’s obligations under the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, adding that the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child had also made clear its concern earlier this year.

“Sadly, we continue to receive reports of juvenile offenders receiving death sentences and we have asked the Iranian authorities to look into them as a matter of urgency”, the report said.

“We remain concerned about the limits imposed on freedom of expression and assembly, the lack of freedom of religion and the extensive use of the death penalty”, it added.

The annual report went on to highlight the Islamic Republic’s abuse of the right to free speech. “Iran has not respected freedom of expression. The government is increasing its censorship of all the main media and particularly the internet. It has blocked many websites and weblogs that provide news or comment critical of the regime and has closed down a number of reformist newspapers. The authorities have arrested and imprisoned journalists, internet technicians and webloggers”.

“In late 2004 several webloggers claimed that they had been beaten, kept in solitary confinement and tortured. The government set up a presidential commission to investigate. A former vice-president of Iran said their testimonies had ‘made committee members weep’. Tehran’s chief prosecutor, Saeed Mortazavi, reportedly threatened those who gave evidence with lengthy prison sentences and harm to their family members”.

The report also said that Non-Governmental Organisations had come under pressure. “The authorities have intimidated and arrested activists and human rights defenders, including some when they returned from conferences overseas”.

Regarding the rights of women the United Kingdom’s annual report stated that discrimination was pervasive. “A woman’s testimony in court is worth half that of a man. Married women need their husband’s permission to get a passport and travel overseas”.

The UK will make human rights a priority issue in its relations with Iran during its Presidency of the European Union in the second half of 2005, the report added.

Laureate Censures Iran for Hanging two Teens
July 24, 2005
The Associated Press
Ali Akbar Dareini

Nobel Peace laureate Shirin Ebadi on Saturday condemned the hanging of two teenagers accused of raping younger boys in northeastern Iran, a punishment that also prompted protests by the international community and rights groups.

Last week's hangings of an 18-year-old and 16-year-old on charges of involvement in homosexual acts violated Iran's obligations under the International Convention on the Rights of the Child, which bans such executions, Ebadi said.

Ebadi said her Center for the Protection of Human Rights will intensify its fight against Iran's executions of minors.

''My calls for a law clearly banning execution of under-18s has fallen on deaf ears so far, but I will not give up the fight,'' Ebadi said.

Mahmoud Asgari, 16, and Ayaz Marhoni, 18, were hanged publicly July 19 in the city of Mashhad on charges of raping younger boys. They said before their executions that they were not aware that homosexual acts were punishable by death.

Death sentences for children

Asgari had been accused of raping a 13-year-old boy. His lawyer, Rohollah Razaz Zadeh, said Iranian courts are supposed to commute death sentences handed to children to five years in jail.

''The judiciary has trampled its own laws,'' Razaz Zadeh said.

The lawyer said Iran's Supreme Court upheld the verdict and allowed the executions.

Gay rights groups, such as London-based Outrage!, and Iranian opposition groups suggested the rape allegations were trumped-up charges aimed to undermine public sympathy for the teens.

Ebadi, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2003, has campaigned to protect the rights of children and improve human rights in Iran but has met stiff resistance from the judiciary, which is controlled by hard-liners.

The Iranian government last year refused to give Ebadi permission to rally to protest children's executions. Under Iranian law, girls older than 9 and boys older than 15 face execution if they commit crimes such as murder and rape. Under certain conditions, capital punishment is imposed for those engaging in illegal sexual relations.

In 2003, a 16-year-old girl said to be suffering from a psychological disorder was executed in Neka, a town in northern Iran, on charges of having an illegal sexual relationship.

Iranian Government Cracks Down on Blogging

July 24, 2005
Channel NewsAsia
Roxana Saberi in Tehran

TEHRAN -- Over the past few years, blogging has been booming in the Islamic Republic of Iran. To blog is the American slang term for writing a web log - a log on the World Wide Web of a person's thoughts, reactions and photos tied to events in their own life or anywhere in the world.

Many Iranians have turned to blogs as a new avenue for self-expression and to gain information. But the regime is cracking down on this hobby.

News, ideas and rumours are reaching Iranians through an untraditional but increasingly popular route - blogging.

Some estimates put the number of Iran's internet users at 5 million and the number of blogs in the Farsi language at up to 100,000. About a third of those are said to originate in Iran and the rest abroad.

In the past few years, Iranians who feel freedom of the press is limited and those looking for independent information have moved into the blogosphere.

19-year-old Shams says he and his friends have used blogs to meet people.

He said: "Girls and boys can't be seen in public together. They can't set up an appointment outside. And many have limits on using the phone. A father says to his daughter you can't use the phone. So she says, Dad, I want to use the Internet to study."

But Iran's regime has been cracking down on this popular form of communication. It has ordered Internet service providers to block a number of weblogs.

The popular weblog "Orkut," where Iranians made webpages introducing themselves, has been blocked for the past few months.

"I was a member of Orkut until it was closed. I didn't use it a lot but I was a member," said one user.

And though some creative Iranians have found ways to get around the filters, internet cafes say they feel sorry for their disappointed customers.

"The morality police ordered our Internet Service Provider to close the ISP sites. We don't have any access anymore," said an Iranian.

Still, some government officials are trying to use blogs to their own advantage.

Last year, Mohammad Ali Abtahi, a former Reformist vice president, began the first blog by a member of the Iranian cabinet.

And in the recent presidential elections, most candidates used weblogs and websites to get their messages out to the Iranian people.

Despite the threat of government censorship and punishment, blogs are opening up Iran's society, culture and politics.



Hard-line officials have long denied the use of torture in Iranian detention centers, despite complaints by intellectuals and student leaders of intolerable physical and psychological torture while being incarcerated.

Several journalists and political dissidents have said they made false confessions under duress.


Iran Report Says Rights Violations Common in Prison
July 23, 2005
Reuters
reuters.com

TEHRAN -- An unprecedented report from Iran's conservative judiciary acknowledged that human rights violations were widespread in prisons, the ISNA students news agency said on Saturday.

According to ISNA, the report said prisoners faced solitary confinement, torture, unwarranted arrest and possibly sexual harassment when detained by Iran's judiciary, military and police.

Iran's former reformist-dominated parliament last year wrote into law an order from Judiciary Chief Ayatollah Mahmoud Hashemi-Shahroudi that banned torture and solitary confinement.

"Any kind of torture used to extract confessions ... is banned and confessions made under such circumstances are not legal," the legislation said.

But the judicial report, parts of which were shared with ISNA, said the legislation had been ignored in several cases.

"The report accepts that torture and solitary confinement exist in detention centers and asks for measures to address this," wrote ISNA.

The report said a detention center run by the conservative Revolutionary Guard had refused to admit inspectors.

The judiciary says it has the right to oversee all detention centers, but some security and military groups bar them.

Iran's constitution specifically outlaws the use of torture, but human rights groups say the Islamic Republic's security forces routinely use it to extract confessions.

Several journalists and political dissidents have said they were forced to make false confessions and were mistreated in detention.

ISNA said Abbasali Alizadeh, the head of Tehran's judicial department, who also heads a committee overseeing anti-torture legislation had shared the report with the agency.

Judiciary spokesman Jamal Karimirad was not immediately able to confirm details of the report to Reuters but said that he would check facts with Alizadeh.