Recent reports published by human rights organizations indicate that human rights conditions in Iran have not changed much since Hassan Rouhani came to office last June.
In its annual global report this year, Human Rights Watch for example wrote, “While tens of human rights activists and opposition figures were released from prisons around Iran in September 2013 months after Rouhani took up the presidential office,” but at around the same time “other groups continued to be in prison on charges of associating with opposition political parties which had been banned.” This included leaders of workers organizations, students, university lecturers and others who had been detained in relations to their political activities in 2005. Many students have been banned from continuing their higher education and lecturers from teaching at universities.
The Human Rights Watch report also writes on the continued house arrests of Mir-Hossein Mousavi, Mehdi Karoubi and Zahra Rahnavard, Iran’s refusal to allow UN’s special human rights rapporteur Ahmad Shahid to visit Iran, the mistreatment of minorities, discriminatory laws and practices against women, and executions as examples of “serious violations” of human rights in Iran.
According to the report, at least 270 people were executed in the country last year, an issue that was echoed by other human rights organizations.
On January 17, 2014, Amnesty International announced through a statement that since the beginning of 2014 up to January 17, at least 40 people were executed by authorities in Iran. From amongst this number, 21 were executed by official announcements of the Islamic republic while the other 19 had been reported by reliable sources close to AI.
These reports also write that the number of executing that took place in the first year of Rouhani’s presidency exceeded the number of executions during Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s comparable period.
Iranian human rights organizations such as Markaze Asnade Hoghooghe Bashar Iran (Center for Human Rights Records in Iran) also wrote that in recent months and after the June 2013 presidential elections, a new record had been set for executions in the country and that at least 125 people had been executed on various charges.
Sadegh Larijani, the head of Iran’s judiciary recently protested about critics who questioned capital punishment in Iran and proclaimed that opposition to execution translated into opposition to Islamic tenets. He also said that the Islamic republic did not pay attention to what he called were “illogical” and “untruthful” remarks.
The Human Rights Watch report asks Hassan Rouhani to take a position against the blatant serious violations of human rights by the country’s intelligence and security forces and fulfill the promises that he had made during his presidential campaign regarding reducing restrictions on the free flow of information and other censorship practices prevalent in Iran.
Rouhani’s administration recently presented a draft of a civil rights charter to the public for comment, which was immediately criticized by human rights activities which said it fell short on many counts.
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