Shirin Ebadi.4
In April, an appeals court informed defence lawyer Mohammad Ali Dadkhah that it had upheld his nine-year sentence on charges related to his interviews with foreign media and membership of the CHRD. He was barred from practice and teaching for 10 years .Authorities have detained lawyer Nasrin Sotoudeh since her arrest in 2010, frequently held her in solitary confinement, and prevented her from regularly meeting or speaking with her family. An appeal court sentenced her to six years’ imprisonment and a 10-year ban on lawyering. Other rights defenders in prison include defence lawyer Mohammad Seifzadeh, another CHRD founder who is currently serving two years and was sentenced to six more years, and Mohammad Sadiq Kaboudvand, the president of the Human Rights Organization of Kurdistan, who is serving an 11-year sentence.
Iran’s use of the death penalty remains a serious concern. According to Amnesty International, the authorities carried out more than 600 executions in 2011 and more than 500 in 2012 – many of them not officially announced by the government. The number of executions by public hangings has also increased dramatically.
According to the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, 55 public hangings took place in 2012.5 The authorities have carried out public hangings in major metropolitan squares as well as sports stadiums. Crimes punishable by death include – along with murder, rape, and espionage, – repeat conviction for alcohol
consumption, adultery, sodomy, and drug trafficking and possession, as well as economic and security offences.
Iran leads the world in the execution of juvenile offenders. Iranian law allows capital punishment for persons who have reached puberty, defined as 9 for girls and 15 for boys. According to Human Rights Watch, in late2012, there were more than 100 juvenile offenders on death row. The Special Rapporteur flagged the case of
two men sentenced to death in June 2012 for consuming alcohol for the third time.
The judiciary in 2012 ordered and implemented an increasing number of cruel and inhuman punishments, suchas limb amputations, in many cases amounting to torture. Many of these sentences were carried out in public and the authorities extensively publicised them, including by circulation of pictures of the amputation act, legitimising the use of cruel, inhumane and degrading punishments before the Iranian public. On November 13, 2012, four fingers of two individuals convicted of theft were amputated in public in Yazd province.6 More recently, on January 24, 2013, authorities amputated fingers of a 29-year-old convict in the city of Shiraz.7
Iranian women continue to face legalised discrimination in the Constitution, penal code, as well as the civil code, personal status matters related to marriage, divorce, inheritance, and child custody. Several universities banned female enrolment in several academic fields.
Dissident Shi’a clerics and Shi’a-born adherents to informal associations and Muslim minorities, including Sunnis, face discrimination in political participation and employment. The authorities deny freedom of religion
to adherents of the Baha’i faith, Iran’s largest non-Muslim religious minority, and regularly target Sufis and
members of Iran’s home church movement. The government has restricted cultural and political activities
among the country’s Azerbaijani, Turkic-speaking, Kurdish, Arab, and Baluch minorities. Security forces
detained, tortured, and executed dozens of Iranian Arab activists in south-western Khuzestan province since
2011; several Baluch were executed in January and February and Kurdish political prisoners were on death row.
The HRC country mandate has made Iranians both inside and outside the country more aware of human rights standards and facilitated their engagement with the international community. Victims and activists have told
4
Among other cases, an appeal court sentenced human rights lawyer Abdolfattah Soltani in early June 2012 to 13 years in
prison and barred him from practicing law for 10 years for establishing the Center for Human Rights Defenders (CHRD), cofounded with Nobel peace laureate Shirin Ebadi" http://www.fidh.org/IRAN-United-Nations-Working-Group-12849
5
UN human rights office condemns execution of Iranian juvenile, January 22, 2013. Available at:
http://www.un.org/apps/news/story.asp?NewsID=43980&#.USuRU47nsoR
6
Four Fingers of Two Individuals Convicted of Theft Amputated in Public in Iran, November 16, 2012. Available at:
http://www.iranhumanrights.org/2012/11/amputation_yazd/
7
Amputation Machine, February 7, 2013. Available at: http://www.iranhumanrights.org/2013/02/photo_3/; and original
link for the picture of the amputation machine on the semi-official Iranian news website (ISNA) as follows:
http://fars.isna.ir/Default.aspx?NSID=5&SSLID=46&NID=237764
human rights groups that they see the office of the Special Rapporteur as an objective, critical focal point for documenting rights abuses, and an impartial and reliable channel of communication between victims and the United Nations and its member states.
In this regard, the Special Rapporteur fulfils an important, unique and independent role exposing human rights violations in Iran. As human rights violations in Iran relate to broad and diverse categories of human rights, the mandate of the Special Rapporteur ensures that the full range of such abuses are documented and the
government of Iran made accountable for them. The role of the Special Rapporteur will be even more crucial in bringing particular attention to the human rights dimension in the lead up to the June 2013 elections.
Extending the Special Rapporteur mandate will send an important message to the Iranian authorities that violations should stop and urge them to comply with their international obligations, to restore the dialogue with the international community and to genuinely cooperate with international human rights mechanisms.
The Human Rights Council should also adopt a resolution which condemns the patterns of systematic violations committed in Iran and reflects the concerns expressed by the General Assembly, as well as the conclusions of the reports of the United Nations Secretary-General and of the Special Rapporteur on the situation of Human Rights in Iran.
For these reasons, we urge your delegation to support the adoption of the resolution and the renewal of the mandate of the Special Rapporteur in Iran during the upcoming session of the Human Rights Council in Geneva.
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For more information:
FIDH:
press@fidh.org
League for the Defence of Human Rights in Iran (LDDHI)
lddhi@fidh.org
گزارشگر ویژه در گزارش خود به نشست 67 مجمع عمومی سازمان ملل به موارد شکنجه روانی و جسمانی، شوک الکتریکی، تجاوز، محاکمه های ناعادلانه، تبعید و ممنوعیت از مسافرت به خارج از کشور ـ که ناشی از تناقض‌های قانونی، پایبند نبودن به حاکمیت قانون و معافیت گسترده از مجازات است ـ اشاره کرده است (1). 