UANI Resources: Brutal Iranian Human Rights Violations Condemned By UN

Tehran’s Disregard For Human Rights Is Latest In History Of Violence Against Its Citizens

(New York, N.Y.) – As Iran reels from an outbreak of the coronavirus resulting in large part from regime mismanagement of the pandemic, its domestic repression continues. On Monday, state media reported the arrest of five people over a prank video. The government also continues to hold hostage dual-nationals—including those with preexisting health problems, who are at heightened risk of contracting the coronavirus.

Last week, United Nations Special Rapporteur for Human Rights in Iran, Javaid Rehman, also briefed the UN Human Rights Council on his report of the human rights situation in Iran. Notably, Rehman’s report focused on the brutal crackdown by the regime against its citizens during the country’s November protests. The peaceful protesters, who contested the rise in fuel prices and economic hardships caused by the regime’s corrupt and malign behaviors, were attacked by the IRGC with live ammunition. Rehman’s report reiterated the need for an independent investigation into the incident in which at least 300 people were killed, including 20 children, and over 7,000 were detained.

Major protests in recent years have been met by violence, detentions, executions, and obstruction of communications. The regime kills or injures protesters; detains, imprisons, and tortures them; and impedes Iranians’ access to the internet and social media.

• Mass demonstrations focused on the state of the economy and regime mismanagement took place in late December 2017 and January 2018. According to the U.S. State Department’s Country Reports on Human Rights Practices for 2018, “Human rights organizations reported at least 30 deaths of protestors during the year, thousands of arrests, and suspicious deaths in custody.” During late-2019 and early-2020 demonstrations, the regime shut down internet access for most Iranians, impeding reporting about the authorities’ violence against demonstrators.
• The regime or its agents killed at least around 80 and as many as several hundred Iranians during the 2009 protests. The most prominent victim was 26-year-old Neda Agha-Soltan, whose death after being shot by an Iranian security forces sniper was captured on video that went viral. Riot police and the IRGC—particularly the IRGC’s paramilitary wing, the Basij—shot protesters with live ammunition and rubber bullets, fired tear gas and pepper spray at them, and hit them with clubs, batons, and baseball bats.
• At least three students were killed and more than 200 injured by Iranian forces in response to demonstrations in 1999. Infamously, plainclothes police and paramilitaries stormed a University of Tehran dormitory, throwing students out of windows and beating students with batons and sticks. Iran’s current president, Hassan Rouhani, played a key role in the regime’s crackdown. He spoke at a huge counter-demonstration to praise the security forces’ suppression of the protests and warned that detained protesters would be tried for the crimes of being ''enemies of the state'' and ''corrupt of the earth,'' both of which carry the death penalty.

United Against Nuclear Iran (UANI) has also catalogued the plight of the dual-national hostages being recklessly held in Iran’s prisons amid the coronavirus outbreak. Its resource American and Western Hostages details the cases of current and former prisoners of the Iranian regime.

To read UANI’s resource: Death, Detention, and Darkness: Iran’s War on Protestors, please click here.

To read UANI’s resource: American and Western Hostages, please click here.

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