AFP: “Canberra urged Iran to respect the human rights of its citizens Tuesday after an actress in the country was sentenced to 90 lashes for appearing in an Australian film with her head uncovered and shaven. Australia's Foreign Minister Kevin Rudd expressed ‘deep concern’ at reports that Marzieh Vafamehr had been sentenced to a year in prison and the lashes for her role in the film ‘My Tehran for Sale’. ‘The Australian government condemns the use of cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment and is deeply concerned by reports that Ms Marzieh Vafamehr has been sentenced to one year in jail and 90 lashes for her role in an Australian-produced film,’ a spokesman for Rudd told AFP.”
Human Rights
Since the Islamic Revolution of 1979, the Iranian regime has imposed a rigid, fundamentalist form of Islamic law on its people and solidified its hold on power by denying Iranians their basic rights and individual liberties. The Iranian regime’s gross human rights violations have targeted a wide array of ethnic and social groups including women, homosexuals, students, Bahais, Christians, Jews, journalists, and political dissenters. The brutal crackdown seen after the June 2009 presidential election drew international outrage, revealing both the thuggish nature of the regime and its propensity to engage in human rights violations and censorship. This tumultuous period saw the detention of over 4,000 election protestors, the closure of 23 newspapers, and the slaying of an estimated 72 political dissidents.
In July 2009, Human Rights Watch summarized that the situation in Iran had become a “human rights crisis,” and described the months following the election as “a period of serious human rights abuses that include extra-judicial killings, violations of the rights to freedom of assembly and expression, and the prohibition of torture, not to mention arbitrary arrest and detention and countless due process violations.”
With its Intolerance Index, United Against Nuclear Iran seeks to compile a comprehensive database of human rights violations committed by the Iranian regime.
To read more about the Iranian regime’s history of flagrant human rights abuses click here and visit our Human Rights Timeline to learn more about the regime’s brutal crackdown on its people since the fraudulent June 2009 elections.
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Timeline
Oct 11
AFP: “Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad spoke out Tuesday against the weekend flogging of a student convicted of insulting him, saying other, more powerful people criticised him with impunity, the presidency website said. ‘Since influential people can freely defame us, I disapprove of flogging a young man for insulting the president,’ Ahmadinejad said during a meeting with regional governors. Peyman Aref, a student activist close to an opposition group, received 74 lashes on Sunday before leaving the prison where he had served a year-long term. He was sentenced in 2010 to one year in prison for political activities and to the whipping for insulting the president. He has also been banned from participating in any journalistic activities or membership in political...
Oct 10
AFP: “The director of an Iranian film documenting violence in the runup to the 2009 presidential vote has been banned from travel to Lebanon, where his film was set to be screened, an organiser said on Sunday. ‘Today we found out that Iranian director Nader Davoodi will not be allowed to travel to Lebanon,’ said Colette Naufal, director of the Beirut International Film Festival which runs from October 5 to 13. ‘Lebanese censorship authorities on Friday requested they see Davoodi's film Red, White and the Green prior to its screening. We informed them that we decided to pull it from our programme,’ Naufal said in a statement. The 2010 film, to be screened as part of the festival's ‘Middle East Documentary Film Competition,’ focuses on the violent events of the last...
Oct 10
AFP: “The court case of an Iranian pastor facing a possible death sentence for apostasy is being referred to Iran's supreme leader, the pastor's lawyer told AFP on Monday. ‘The court has decided to ask the opinion of Mr (Ali) Khamenei,’ Iran's supreme leader, in the matter of pastor Yusef Nadarkhani, lawyer Mohammad Ali Dadkhah said. Ayatollah Khamenei has ultimate authority in the Islamic republic. However the move to involve him in the case is unusual, and suggested that a final verdict in the case -- which has garnered international attention -- could be delayed.”
Oct 05
Guardian: “The BBC's head of global news has called on the UK government to rebuke Iran after relatives of 10 of the corporation's staff were arrested or intimidated following a documentary about the country's supreme leader. Peter Horrocks claimed on Wednesday that Iran was responsible for a ‘dramatic increase in anti-BBC rhetoric’ and that attempts to intimidate the corporation had reached new levels since mid-September, when the BBC aired a documentary on Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. In a post on the BBC's Editors blog, Horrocks said that Tehran had intensified its blocking of the corporation's Persian TV channel, and that relatives and friends of 10 members of staff had been arrested.”
Oct 05
Radio Farda: “Iranian Nobel Peace Prize winner Shirin Ebadi and several other prominent activists and intellectuals, including religious scholar Hassan Yousefi Eshkevari, exiled journalist Akbar Ganji, and former student leader Ali Afshari, have condemned the death sentence given to an Iranian Christian-convert pastor. In their statement, issued on Iranian news websites, the activists describe reports that the pastor, Yusef Naderkhani, has been asked to give up his faith as ‘unbelievable and shocking.’ … The statement says the ‘inhumane and violent’ behavior of Iran's judiciary toward Naderkhani, who converted to Christianity when he was 19 years old, is a clear example of the violation of the rights of an Iranian citizen.”
Oct 04
AP: “A lawyer says an Iranian graduate student studying at the University of Texas has gone on trial in Tehran on charges of having "relations with a hostile country" and receiving ‘illegitimate funds.’ Saeed Khalili says his client, Omid Kokabee, pleaded not guilty to both charges at the opening session of his trial Tuesday. Iranian authorities arrested the 29-year-old Kokabee in February at the Tehran airport. He was studying optics in the physics department at the University of Texas.”
Oct 02
AFP: “Iran on Sunday hanged a convicted rapist in the northern city of Sari, the ISNA news agency reported. The man sent to the gallows had threatened and raped his victim while claiming to be a law enforcement agent, the report added without giving further details. The latest hanging brings the number of executions, reported in Iran so far this year, to 207.”
Oct 02
AFP: “Lawyer Masoud Shafii who represented the now free US hikers held for two years in Iran on espionage and illegal entry charges was barred from leaving the country on Sunday, a source close to the case told AFP. ‘This morning at around six o'clock (0230 GMT), after getting his passport stamped and as he was boarding the plane, his passport was confiscated by order of the judiciary,’ the source said on condition of anonymity. The source added that Shafii ‘could not proceed to his final destination which was the United States,’ without elaborating on why his passport had been seized.”
Sep 27
Fox News: A Florida lawmaker hopes the release of two American hikers from an Iranian prison last week will spur the return of a retired FBI agent missing since 2007. Robert Levinson, a married father of seven from Florida, has been missing since March 9, 2007, after checking out of a hotel on Kish Island, a Persian Gulf resort off the southern coast of Iran. Levinson, who retired from the FBI in 1998, had traveled there to meet an American fugitive accused of murdering a former Iranian official in Maryland in 1980. He was last seen checking out of the Maryam Hotel for the meeting. Sen. Bill Nelson, D-Fla., wrote a letter to U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on Sept. 22, asking her to press the issue during last week's opening of the United Nations General...
Sep 27
Daily Telegraph: Iran's supreme court upheld a sentence to be borne by the 26-year-old waiter, identified by his first name, Mohammad, Shargh newspaper reported Monday. Mohammad had confessed he was hired to throw acid at the victim, Vali, in return for around one million rials (less than £64), the report said. Vali, who was injured and blinded in one eye, asked for ‘qesas’ - an eye for an eye style of justice - and that Mohammad be blinded in retribution. After much deliberation, the panel of judges presiding the case ordered the attacker to be blinded without acid in one eye and pay blood money for Vali's other injuries, the report said.
Sep 27
AFP: Organizers of the Toronto film festival, the largest in North America, on Monday decried the arrest of six filmmakers in Iran ‘whose work should be seen and their voices heard.’ In a statement, they expressed ‘deep concern’ over the arrest last week of Mojtaba Mirtahmasb, Katayoun Shahabi, Hadi Afarideh, Nasser Saffarian, Shahnama Bazdar and Mohsen Shahrnazdar by Iranian authorities on espionage charges. Mirtahmasb is the co-director of banned Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi's latest film ‘This Is Not A Film,’ which was screened earlier this month at the Toronto film festival. ‘We are extremely concerned by the arrest of these six filmmakers, whose work should be seen and their voices heard,’ the organizers said.
Sep 26
NYT: “The two American hikers who were held in Iran on espionage charges say they kept their days strictly regimented, running laps, weight-lifting water bottles, discussing literature and quizzing each other, in an effort to stay physically and mentally fit while in captivity. They spent 781 days that way in the notorious Evin prison in Tehran. On Sunday, the hikers, Shane M. Bauer and Joshua F. Fattal, arrived in New York City after a long diplomatic battle to secure their release that further challenged the fraught relationship between the United States and Iran. A third hiker arrested with them, Sarah E. Shourd, was freed last September. ‘Sarah, Josh and I can now finally leave prison behind us,’ Mr. Bauer, 29, said at a news conference in Manhattan. ‘We want more...
Sep 23
AFP: Mojtaba Mirtahmasb, co-director of banned Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi's latest film, is among six movie makers arrested by Iranian authorities, an opposition website said in a posting seen on Thursday. Iranian media on Saturday reported the arrest of six filmmakers, but identified them only by their initials. The others are directors Nasser Saffarian, Hadi Afariden and Shahnama Bazdar, producer Katayoun Shahabi and journalist and documentary filmmaker Mohsen Shahnazdar, said Rahesabz website which represents the opposition to President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. The filmmakers were arrested at their homes or offices and were transferred to the notorious Evin prison in northern Tehran, relatives said, denouncing a ‘new offensive’ against the filmmaking community....
Sep 13
AFP: Iran hanged five people on Tuesday, three of them for drug trafficking and two in public for murder, local media reported. In the capital, a 25-year-old convicted of murder after he confessed to stabbing a fellow student to death in broad daylight in early July was sent to the gallows near the scene of the crime, a bridge in northwest Tehran, the state television website reported. The man, who was identified only by his first name Kousha, had carried out the crime after the victim spurned him, the website added. In the southern town of Dashtestan, a man was hanged in public after being found guilty of murdering four members of a family a year ago, the Fars news agency reported. In the central shrine city of Qom, Fars said that three convicted drug smugglers it...
Sep 13
AFP: Iran must immediately free Abdolfattah Soltani, a prominent human rights lawyer rearrested at the weekend after spending months behind bars between 2005 and 2009, Amnesty International said on Monday. Soltani, a co-founder of the Centre for Human Rights Defenders along with Nobel Laureate Shirin Ebadi and others, was arrested Saturday at a prosecutor's office in Tehran, the London-based rights watchdog said. His wife said that four security officials then escorted him to his home, where they confiscated computers and documents before taking him away, Amnesty added.
Sep 09
AFP: TORONTO — Iran has prevented a leading filmmaker from leaving the country to attend the Toronto film festival, where his documentary about a detained co-director is being shown, his spokeswoman said Thursday. Mojtaba Mirtahmasb's passport was seized when he tried to board a flight to Paris on Monday to promote the French release of "This is not a Film," spokeswoman Emmanuelle Zinggeler told AFP. The documentary depicts a day in the life of Jafar Panahi as he appeals his conviction for "propaganda against the system" by an Iranian court for making a film about unrest after the disputed re-election of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in June 2009. Panahi, who was sentenced in December to six years in prison and slapped with a 20-year filmmaking ban, is under house...
Sep 08
Boston Globe: London—The BBC says Iran has stepped up the jamming of its Farsi-language television service by interfering with the operation of a Eutelsat satellite. Jamming from within Iran has affected BBC Persian television since its launch in 2009, and the British broadcaster says that one of Eutelsat's high-power Hotbird satellites has been targeted since July. But the BBC now says that Iran has expanded its jamming to target the Paris-based company's W3A satellite, which covers Africa, Europe and parts of the Middle East.
Sep 08
The Independent: Iran’s judiciary have executed three men for sodomy in a case that sheds new light on the official persecution of gay men and women in the authoritarian Islamic Republic. According to a news report carried by the Iranian Student News Agency, the men were put to death by hanging on Sunday morning at Karoun prison in the south western city of Ahvaz. The agency quoted Abdolhamid Amanat, an official at the prosecutor office in Khuzestan Province, as the source of the announcement. In total six people were executed. According to the published charges, two men were put to death for robbery and rape and one was executed for drug trafficking...
Jul 25
Guardian: "A disturbing video of the public execution of three men in Iran has sparked anger among human rights activists. The graphic video, released by Amnesty International on Thursday, showed guards standing on top of buses draping ropes around necks of three convicts sentenced to death by hanging after being convicted of rape. The men were later hanged from an overhead bridge after the vehicles drove away. The executions, which took place on 19 July in the western city of Kermanshah, home to Iran's Kurd minority, attracted significant crowds, including children. Some of the crowds appear to be filming hangings by mobile phones. The video, which was supplied to Amnesty by an Iranian human rights activist, Fazel Hawramy from kurdishblogger.com,...
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