Iran
Human
Rights Developments
Defending Human Rights
The Role of the International Community
Human rights progress in Iran
was caught in a continuing political power struggle between popularly elected
reformers, who controlled both the presidency and Parliament, and clerical
conservatives, who exercised authority through the office of the Leader (held
by Ayatollah Ali Khamenei), the Council of Guardians,
the judiciary, and the armed forces. Despite landslide electoral victories in
every major election from 1997 to 2002, the reformers were unable to dislodge
repressive policies favored by the clerical leadership, including far-reaching
restrictions on freedom of expression, association, and political
participation.
The Council of Guardians
repeatedly blocked bills passed by the Parliament in such areas as women's
rights, family law, the prevention of torture, and electoral reform. The
judiciary, deployed as one of the conservative's strongest weapons, further
undermined the rule of law with arbitrary closures of newspapers and
imprisonment of political activists.
Two notable political
events illustrated the conflict between reformers and conservatives. On July 8,
a leading cleric, Ayatollah Jalaluddin Taheri, announced his resignation as Friday Prayer Leader
of Isfahan. Friday Prayer Leaders, appointed by the
Leader of the Islamic Republic, were the senior religious authorities in their
cities and districts. In his widely circulated letter of resignation, the
Ayatollah, declaring that he would flee what he could no longer tolerate,
issued a ringing denunciation of the clerical establishment. He accused Iran's clerical
leaders of directing and encouraging "a bunch of club wielders" and
of "marrying the ill-tempered, ugly hag of violence to religion." He
observed that the centers of power were "unchecked and unbridled
...neither reproached by the executors of justice nor reproved by the
law." This criticism of lack of accountability, corruption and
lawlessness, coming from someone of impeccable religious credentials at the
heart of the establishment, struck a deep chord. The conservative establishment
sought to limit the damage by ordering official news outlets to restrict their
coverage of the Ayatollah's statement, an order that was
only partially successful.
A second major political
development revealed how structural contradictions within the Islamic Republic
perpetuated the political conflict between reformers and conservatives. In
September, President Khatami presented new bills to
Parliament designed to override obstacles to his reform agenda. One new bill
sought to increase the president's power to issue warnings when state
institutions exceeded their constitutional functions. President Khatami had issued numerous such warnings over the years to
protest the arbitrary closures of newspapers or the jailing of his supporters,
but his warnings had been ignored. The bill was accompanied by another designed
to curb the powers of the Council of Guardians to veto electoral candidates. By
the end of the year, the bills had passed the Parliament easily, but their
endorsement by the Council of Guardians was unlikely.
Attacks against the
independent news media persisted. They had begun in April 2000 with a speech by
the Leader identifying the reformist press as "bases of the enemy."
They continued in November 2001, when the daily Nation (Mellat) was closed by order of the head of the Tehran Press Court,
Judge Said Mortazavi. He accused the newspaper of
cultural bias and of ignoring warnings. The closure followed a pattern,
repeated throughout the year, in which the judiciary ignored the press law
requirement for a public court hearing in front of a jury before any order to
close.
On December 15, 2001,
Mohammad Salamati, editor of Our Era (Asr-e Ma), the mouthpiece of a group called Mojahedine of the Islamic Revolution Organization, was
sentenced to twenty-six months in jail for views he expressed in the journal.
The judge of the press court where he was tried ignored the jury's
recommendation to commute the sentence. Salamati's
sentence was reduced to seventeen months on appeal in March, and suspended
after the intervention of the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance. The
magazine remained closed at this writing. In December 2001 and January 2002,
provincial newspapers in Tabriz, Hormuzgan,
Luristan, and Zanjan were
closed and editors received prison terms of up to eighteen months for inciting
public opinion and insulting Islamic sanctities. Other closures in January
included specialist film magazines accused of offending moral decency. In
April, the Tabriz
general court revoked the publication license of Shams-i
Tabriz
weekly and sentenced publisher Ali Hamed Iman to seven months in jail and seventy-four lashes.
Charges against Iman included publishing lies,
stoking ethnic tensions, and insulting Islamic sanctities and officials.
A further wave of closures
began in May. The judiciary banned the influential reformist newspaper Foundation
(Bonyan). Then it closed the pro-reformist
newspaper Iran
for twenty-four hours. The court gave no reason for the paper's suspension, but
it was believed the decision was related to an allegedly blasphemous article
suggesting that the Prophet Muhammad enjoyed listening to women sing and play
music.
In July, the judiciary shut
the leading reformist newspaper in Iran, New Day (Norouz), for six months. The paper's director, Mohssen Mirdamadi, a senior
reformist personality and a member of Parliament, was
sentenced to six months in jail, though he had not yet begun serving the
sentence at this writing. Norouz was the most
important of the remaining reformist dailies and acted as the voice of the
biggest reform political faction, the Participation Front. Mirdamadi
was also fined and banned from press activities for four years. Another press
court banned New Day (Ruz-e Now) merely because its name was similar to Norouz.
The Tehran daily Mirror
of the South (Ayineh-e Jonub), launched nationwide only a week previously, was
closed in July for allegedly publishing articles contrary to the law and
spreading propaganda against the Islamic revolution. A press court subsequently
banned the Daily Report (Guzarish-i Ruz), which had previously been ordered closed
temporarily. The judiciary also threatened to prosecute Iran's official
Islamic Republic News Agency for printing a statement by the recently banned
opposition party, the Iran Freedom Movement (IFM). Further closures followed
and by the end of the year the number of newspaper and magazines closed since
April 2000 had reached over eighty-five titles. Any pretense that legal principles
would be observed in regulating the press disappeared. Iran's press
courts acted as a law unto themselves, issuing closure orders by decree without
legal basis.
Iran's courts also restricted
independent political activity through a series of political trials of
supporters of the National Religious Alliance (NRA), a loose alliance of reform
minded activists, who had been detained in March and April 2001. In November
2001, more than thirty members of the IFM, a fifty-year-old political party,
went on trial before the Tehran
Revolutionary Court, accused of acts against
national security and planning to overthrow the government. They had been among
those detained in March and April 2001.
Six of the IFM detainees--Abolfazl Bazargan, Mohammad Tavasoli, Hashem Sabaghian, Khosro Mansourian, Mohammad Naeimpour,
and Alireza Hendi--were
held in detention until March 2002 and released while the trial was in session.
Many of the defendants were held incommunicado for months and coerced into
making incriminating statements. At trial, the prosecution presented no
credible evidence that the IFM defendants had engaged in anything other than
legitimate, peaceful political activity. In July, the court sentenced more than
thirty defendants to prison terms. Senior figures in the IFM received sentences
of between eight and ten years. The court also ordered the complete dissolution
of the party. Ibrahim Yazdi,
the leader of the banned party, returned to Iran
in April from medical treatment in the United States. He, too, was facing
criminal charges based on his political activities, although his trial had not
started at this writing.
In a related case, fifteen
NRA activists were tried before the Tehran
Revolutionary Court in January on charges of
seeking to overthrow the government. Ezzatollah Sahhabi, arrested in December 2000, was held in an unknown
location. The other fourteen, arrested in March 2001, were held incommunicado,
most often in solitary confinement, in a Tehran
detention center known as Prison 59. Nine of the detainees--Mohammad Maleki, Mohammad Hossein Rafiei, Alireza Rajaei, Reza Alijani, MohammadBasteh Negar, Mahmoud Omrani, Massoud Pedram, Morteza Kazemian, and MohammadMohammadi Ardehali--were
released on bail in 2001. The other five--Taghi Rahmani, Habibollah Payman, Reza Raeis-Toussi, Saeid Madani, and Hoda Saber--remained in Prison 59 until March 2002 and were
only released after paying large bail sums. One detainee, Saeid
Madani, paid one billion rials,
a sum equivalent to more than U.S.$500,000 at the official
exchange rate.
Prison 59, located in a
Revolutionary Guard military installation in Eshratabad
in central Tehran,
is an unregulated detention facility outside the official penal system. All of
the detainees, many of whom were elderly, complained of harsh treatment while
in detention, including being beaten by their captors and, for much of the
time, being held in small cells where they could only lie in a cramped
position.
Detention conditions for
several elderly prisoners were a cause of particular concern. Ezzatollah Sahhabi, more than
seventy years old, was hospitalized twice with heart attacks. His medications
were adjusted, but he was not been permitted to meet with his own doctor.
Another prisoner, Dr. Habibollah Payman,
sixty-six, a dentist, suffered from severe kidney and urinary tract problems,
but was given only limited toilet access. He was forced to use the drinking
vessel in his cell to relieve himself, rinsing it out when given access to the
bathroom. Dr. Raeis Toussi,
sixty-five, a law professor at Tehran
University, had one
interrogation session that lasted more than twenty-four hours and three that
exceeded eighteen hours each, all of which exacerbated a serious back injury.
He was held in solitary confinement for 168 days. During the detentions, the
judiciary blocked access to the detainees and prevented President Khatami from sending an observer to visit them.
A third trial arising from
the March and April 2001 arrests involved Habibollah Peyman, leader of the Militant Muslims Movement (Junbash-i Musalmanan-i Mubarez). His
closed-door trial began in Tehran
on April 7. He, too, was released on payment of substantial bail, after
spending more than a year in detention, much of it incommunicado in solitary
confinement. His lawyer complained that he was deprived of access to
prosecution documents relating to the case. There was no outcome in this trial
at this writing.
In other political
proceedings, the conservative-dominated judiciary convicted several politicians
allied with President Khatami. In January, Member of
Parliament (M.P.) Hossein Loghmanian
was sentenced to ten months in prison. He had been convicted for insulting the
judiciary in a speech he gave to Parliament, criticizing the arbitrary closure
of newspapers, and protesting the imprisonment of political prisoners. Leader
of the Islamic Republic Ayatollah Ali Khamenei
pardoned the jailed reformist M.P. after a walkout by members of Parliament.
Two prominent jailed
journalists, Emadedin Baqi
and Akbar Ganji,
remained in prison. Four other prisoners--Mohssen Youssefi Eshkevari, Ali Afshari, Khalil Rostamkhani, and Saeid Sadre--continued serving sentences for their participation
in the March 2000 Berlin conference. (See Human Rights Watch World Report 2001.) In April, another prominent reformist
journalist, Ahmed Zeid Abadi,
received a twenty-three-month jail term for spreading propaganda against the
state and insulting officials. He had been detained two years previously for
seven months. He remained free on bail pending appeal.
On July 2, a court in Hamedan announced that it had summoned Hashem
Aghajari, a leader of the Mojahedine
of the Islamic Revolution Organization (MIRO), to face charges of insulting
religious sanctities. The charges followed a celebrated speech he made in June
criticizing the clergy's role in politics and urging disobedience of senior
clerical leaders on religious grounds. MIRO was an important strand of the
coalition of reformist groups in the Parliament and Aghajari's
blunt comments indicated growing frustration among some reformists over the
lack of progress. In November, a Revolutionary
Court sentenced Aghajari
to death for blasphemy and insulting the clergy. His lawyer filed an appeal
against the sentence in December.
Behrouz Geranpayeh,
the head of the National Institute for Opinion Polls, was detained in October
and held incommunicado for more than a month while under interrogation after
publishing a poll showing the majority of Iranians favored restoring relations
with the United States.
In November, two heads of private research institutes that had conducted the
poll, Abbas Abdi and Hossein Ali Ghazian, also
prominent reformist figures, were arrested. They faced charges of
"collaboration with U.S.
elements and British Intelligence" and of conducting "psychological
warfare" aimed at overthrowing the government.
Other notable incidents of
arbitrary detention included that of Siamak Pourzand, a seventy-three-year-old journalist seized
outside his sister's house in November 2001. He was then held in an unknown
location before being brought to trial, in secret, in March. With their
disregard for pre-trial safeguards, the proceedings flagrantly violated fair
trial standards. The journalist was released in November, but remained under
threat of prosecution.
In June, an Iranian dancer,
Mohamad Khordadian, who had
been living in Los Angeles
for twenty-two years before returning to visit his family, was arrested on charges
of corrupting public morality. At his trial he received a ten-year suspended
prison term and was banned from returning to the United States. In September, an
actress, who kissed a film director at a film festival, was also prosecuted for
corrupting public morality. These high-profile prosecutions exemplified
attempts by hardline conservatives to generate public
concern over a supposed decline in public morality, of which they were the
self-appointed guardians.
Senior Shi'a
religious leaders and their supporters who dissented from the ruling clerical
establishment remained targets of official persecution. A telling incident
occurred in Qom
in December 2001, at the funeral for Grand Ayatollah Mohammad Shirazi, a leading clerical figure who questioned the form
of government in the Islamic Republic. At the funeral, his body was seized by
security forces and interred in Hazrat-i Masumeh mosque, the major shrine in the city. He had
expressed his wish to be buried on the grounds of his house, but the authorities
apparently feared that his tomb might become a rallying point for clerical
opposition.
Grand Ayatollah Hossain Ali Montazeri, the former
designated successor to Ayatollah Khomeini as Leader of the Islamic Republic,
remained under house arrest in Qom, although his ideas continued
to circulate widely.
Iran's religious and ethnic minorities
remained subject to discrimination and persecution. Representatives of the
predominantly Sunni Muslim Kurdish minority protested the appointment of a new
governor of Kurdistan province from the Shi'a majority. The authorities overlooked Sunni candidates
for the post put forward by Kurdish parliamentarians. The lack of public school
education in Kurdish language remained a perennial source of Kurdish
frustration.
The banned Kurdish
opposition party, the Peoples Democratic Party of Iran (PDKI), which had
engaged in armed opposition to the government, announced that the Iranian
government had executed Karim Toujali
in Mahabad on January 24, 2002. Toujali
had sought political asylum in Turkey,
but had been unsuccessful in his claim. Turkish police then forcibly returned
him to Iran.
In October, another PDKI prisoner, Hamzeh Ghaderi, was executed in Orumieh.
The PDKI claimed that another five supporters were executed with Ghaderi. Other PDKI supporters reportedly remained in jail
facing execution.
The ten Jewish Iranians
sentenced to prison in Shiraz
in 2000 were released in October after appeals for their release by the
representative of the Jewish community in Parliament, Maurice Motamed. Some of the prisoners had served longer than their
allotted sentences. Throughout the year, Motamed also
drew attention to institutional discrimination against religious minorities,
including continued limits on access to educational opportunities and
employment. In August, in a bold move, he proposed a bill calling for
equivalence in the amount of Diyeh (blood
money) between Muslims and non-Muslims. The Qisas
(retribution) system of criminal law specifies penalties for various crimes which
differ according to the religion of the victim and the perpetrator. In general,
non-Muslims are subject to harsher penalties and enjoy fewer protections than
Muslims. Motamed's bill, which remained under
consideration at the end of the year, would remove these discrepancies although
it would not apply to Iran's
largest religious minority, followers of the Baha'i
faith.
Baha'is also continued to face persecution,
including being denied permission to worship or to carry out other communal
affairs publicly. At least four Baha'is were serving
prison terms for their religious beliefs. Bihnam Mithaqi and Kayvan Khalajabadi, imprisoned since 1989, were informed in
January that their sentences would run until 2004. Musa
Talibi, imprisoned in 1994, was held in Isfahan.
It was not clear whether his death sentence had been commuted. Zhabihullah Mahrami, imprisoned
since 1995 and convicted of apostasy, had his death sentence commuted in March.
The campaign by
conservatives against moral decline, noted above, was accompanied by an
increase in public executions and corporal punishment. In October, the
authorities carried out public executions of five men convicted of a series of
attacks on women in Tehran.
Their bodies were hoisted on mobile cranes and driven through the city. In Hamedan, on October 15, two thieves convicted of more than
thirty robberies each had four fingers amputated in a public ceremony.
With the collapse of the
Taliban government in Afghanistan,
hundreds of thousands of Afghan refugees who had been living in Iran began to
return. The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) expressed
concern that Iranian authorities were exerting pressure on Afghan refugees to
leave, a charge denied by the Iranian government. Some one million Afghan refugees
remained in Iran
at this writing.
Shadowy underground
paramilitary forces, linked to hardline conservative
clerical leaders unwilling to relinquish their continuing grip on power,
continued to be implicated in violent unrest. Sporadic clashes in the streets
between crowds and riot police supported by Basij,
religious paramiltary forces, occurred at various
times throughout the year. One clash took place in October 2001 following Iran's
elimination from the soccer World Cup. Although these clashes and demonstrations
often took on a political complexion, they tended to be small and easily
contained by the authorities.
Several thousand people
marched in Tehran in July in what was becoming
an annual event to commemorate a 1999 raid by paramilitary forces on student
dormitories at Tehran
University. At least four
students detained in 1999--Ahmed Batebi, Mehrdad Lohrassbi, Akbar Mohammadi
and Manouchehr Mohammadi--remained
in prison serving long prison terms. There were sporadic clashes with police
and hardline vigilantes, but no serious disturbances.
The major student organization that supported the reform movement had urged its
members to stay away from the march for fear of provoking a clash with
hardliners.
Students nationwide
protested the death sentence imposed on Hashem Aghajari in November. Protests subsided when senior
clerical leaders threatened the students. On November 22, Ayatollah Khamenei issued an ultimatum stating that students should
"return to their homes" or "the people will intervene"
against them, a thinly veiled threat to unleash the same paramilitary forces
that the authorities had used in July 1999 to crush student protests.
Access to the country for
independent human rights investigators remained restricted, although the
government did declare its willingness to admit U.N. special rapporteurs to the country. There continued to be lively
discussion of human rights issues in the press and in Parliament, although
independent local human rights groups were not permitted to function.
Several lawyers known for
their defense of human rights were targets of prosecution. Mohammad Dadkhah, part of the defense team of the Iranian Freedom
Movement, was sentenced to five months in prison in May. He was also banned
from practicing law for ten years.
The judiciary confirmed the
sentences of several lawyers associated with reformist causes, including cases
relating to the assassinations of writers and intellectuals in 1998. One
lawyer, Nasser Zarafshan, was sentenced to five years
in prison and fifty lashes. The bar
association described the flogging sentence as indefensible and unjustifiable.
The appeal was dismissed. Zarafshan had probed the
involvement of Ministry of Intelligence officials in the 1998 murders and
claimed in the press that there were more victims of these killings than had
been mentioned in the trial of officials involved in the killings.
European Union
European and Iranian
officials met repeatedly throughout the year to extend cooperation in a range
of areas, including counter-terrorism, trade, and the promotion of human
rights. The E.U. remained committed to a policy of engaging with Iranian
leaders, while at the same time giving human rights a high profile in its public
discourse about the relationship. E.U. Commissioner for External Affairs Chris
Patten told the BBC that the dialogue was aimed at bolstering Iranian
reformists, such as elected president Mohammad Khatami.
"It can't seriously be anybody's idea of a good way of promoting stability
in the region to think that we should isolate and cut Iran off
forever," he said. "If you don't talk to the reasonable people, you
fetch up with fewer reasonable people to talk to."
The improvement of
relations with the E.U. remained vulnerable to interference by hardliners
opposed to such normalization. In March, the planned visit to Berlin of Speaker
of Parliament Hojatoleslam Mehdi Karrubi
was canceled when Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder declined to receive him, a
decision that many observers believed resulted from political machinations by Iran's
conservative judiciary. Schroeder was displeased with the apparently punitive
transfer of Said Sadr to a remote and notorious
prison near the Afghan border in advance of Karrubi's
visit. Sadr, an Iranian employee at the German
embassy in Tehran, had been imprisoned in Iran since the
controversial Berlin Conference in 2000. Shortly before his planned trip, Karrubi apparently had angered hardliners by telling German
journalists that he was trying to secure Sadr's
release; the judiciary responded by transferring Sadr
to the remote prison, derailing the visit.
In a move likely to please
the Iranian government, the E.U. recognized the Mojahedine
Khalq Organization (MKO) as a terrorist group on May
3. The MKO was based in Iraq
and launched armed attacks against Iranian targets. It was described as a
foreign terrorist organization by the U.S. State Department. The E.U., however,
did not include the affiliated National Council of Resistance in its designation.
On June 17, the E.U. placed
human rights at the top of a list of four areas in which it wanted to see
improvements through its policy of engagement with Iran: (1) human rights and
fundamental freedoms; (2) non-proliferation; (3) terrorism; and (4) the Middle
East peace process.
In September, Iran approved a
new British ambassador. The move ended an eight-month diplomatic dispute
following Tehran's rejection in January of David
Reddaway, described by conservative newspapers in Iran as a
Zionist and a spy. It was an indicator of the importance given to Iran by the E.U. and the U.K. that embarrassing incidents of this nature were not
permitted to stall the momentum of engagement. British Foreign Secretary Jack
Straw traveled to Iran in
October to further advance the relationship but was met by an upturn in
political and public executions, interpreted by many as another example of the
conservatives using their control over the judiciary to seek to influence Iran's foreign
policy.
United Nations
In April, during the fifty-eigth session of the U.N. Commission on Human Rights, a
draft resolution criticizing the situation in Iran was defeated by a roll-call
vote of twenty to nineteen, with fourteen abstentions, marking the first time
in more than fifteen years that a resolution criticizing Iran's human rights
practices did not pass at the commission. It brought to an end the mandate of
the U.N. special representative on human rights in Iran and was seen as a major
victory for Iranian diplomacy. The Iranian government regarded the special
representative's mandate as political and repeatedly blocked his access to the
country, despite the balanced and constructive tone of his reporting over many
years.
In July, Iran said it
would give immediate access to United Nations thematic rapporteurs
to allow them to examine its human rights record. Iran's ambassador, Mohammed Reza Alborzi, told High Commissioner for Human Rights Mary
Robinson that specialists would "be welcome." By the end of the year
no visits had taken place.
United States
Possibilities for an
improvement in U.S.-Iranian relations based on the shared goal of removing the
Taliban from power in Afghanistan
were not realized due to continuing U.S. concerns over Iranian support
for terrorism. Such concerns were exemplified by the seizure of the Karine A, caught smuggling weapons from Iran to the
Palestinian Authority.
President Bush's
characterization of Iran, Iraq, and North Korea as an "axis of evil"
during his January 29 State of the Union address caused anger in Iran across
all factions within the clerical leadership. It fueled expectations among parts
of public opinion that the U.S.
would intervene directly in Iran,
as it had in Afghanistan,
and change the government. The government and many Iranians resented this
implied interference in their affairs.
In July, President Bush
issued a subtler statement that, though barely
reported in the U.S.,
sparked much debate in Iran.
It came a few days after clashes between students and police in Tehran on the anniversary
of the 1999 student demonstrations and the resignation of a prominent cleric,
Ayatollah Jalaledine Taheri,
who had accused the Iranian authorities of corruption and repression. In his
written statement, President Bush expressed solidarity with the students,
saying, "their government should listen to their
hopes." In a targeted phrase, the president urged Iran's
un-elected leaders to abandon policies that denied Iranians the opportunities
and rights of people elsewhere. In singling out un-elected leaders for
criticism the President appeared to be differentiating between factions within
the Iranian power structure. This more measured approach to Iran made the U.S. government's statements an
important influence on human rights conditions in the country for the first
time in many years.
The U.S. continued to block Iran's access
to loans from international financial institutions. For example, in September,
the U.S.
blocked the private-sector financing arm of the World Bank, the International
Finance Corporation, from investing U.S.$2 million in
an Iranian company. The World Bank had planned to lend Iran hundreds of millions of dollars, but the U.S.
effectively blocked the deals.
In March, the U.S. State
Department's Country Reports on Human Rights Practices for 2001 called
the Iranian government's human rights record "poor" and detailed
significant restrictions on citizens' right to change their government. In
September, the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom identified Iran, together
with eleven other states, as countries of particular concern with respect to
violations of the rights to freedom of religion.
Iranians worried about U.S. military action in nearby Afghanistan and threatened action in Iraq, but they were also interested in the
administration's strong rhetoric supporting democracy and human rights in Iran. The
openness of Iranians to the U.S.
was seen in September when the state news agency, IRNA, published the results
of a public opinion poll showing that 75 percent of Iranians favored a dialogue
between Iran and the United States, and almost 50 percent approved of
U.S.
policy toward the country. The judiciary responded by closing down the
institute that conducted the poll and prosecuting the poll's director and the
director of the news agency that published it. Some conservative leaders even
called for the criminalization of advocating dialogue or normalization with the
United States.
However, the reformists appeared emboldened by the public mood. President Khatami admonished the critics of dialogue and expressed
his own willingness to enter into discussions with the United State
without preconditions.
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