On The Line: Human Rights In Iran
BayBak, Azerbaijan | Saturday, 28th July , 2007 , 00:54 [am] | Azerbaijan
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. | Those imprisoned in Iran include journalists, student activists, labor leaders, and even dissident Muslim clerics. Amnesty International reports that Ayatollah Hossein Kazemeini Boroujerdi has been sentenced to death, supposedly for “waging war against God.” He was arrested in October 2006 after calling for the separation of religion from politics. According to the U-S State Department’s latest human rights report, |
Transcript
Host: This is On the Line, and I’m Eric Felten.
Four Iranian-Americans are being held against their will by the radical clerical regime in Iran. Two of them, Middle East scholar Haleh Esfandiari and social scientist Kian Tajbakhsh, were paraded on Iranian state-run television and forced to “confess” to vague crimes against the state. The other two American citizens, journalist Parnaz Azima and peace activist Ali Shakeri, have also been charged with threatening Iran’s national security.
The United States is calling on Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei “to release all Americans currently being held on groundless charges.” State Department spokesman Sean McCormack said the U-S is appalled at their mistreatment:
McCormack: “These are people who have devoted large chunks of their lives to building bridges between the Iranian and the American people, so to prevent these kinds of people from especially leaving Iran really sends a negative message and is an unfortunate comment about the nature of this particular regime.”
Host: Americans of course are not the only political prisoners in Iran. Iranian democratic activists and protestors are routinely arrested and beaten by police and government-sponsored vigilante groups. Delaram Ali was among some seventy women’s rights activists arrested for taking part in a peaceful demonstration in Tehran in 2006. They were protesting Iranian laws that discriminate against women. Though most of the women were later released, Delaram Ali was held for a year before being convicted of the so-called crimes of “propaganda against the state” and “disrupting public order.” She was sentenced to be whipped and imprisoned for another three years.
Those imprisoned in Iran include journalists, student activists, labor leaders, and even dissident Muslim clerics. Amnesty International reports that Ayatollah Hossein Kazemeini Boroujerdi has been sentenced to death, supposedly for “waging war against God.” He was arrested in October 2006 after calling for the separation of religion from politics. According to the U-S State Department’s latest human rights report, Iran’s government “flagrantly violated freedom of speech and assembly, intensifying its crackdown against dissident, journalists, and reformers – a crackdown characterized by arbitrary arrests and detentions, torture, disappearances, the use of excessive force, and the widespread denial of fair public trials.”
Joining us to talk about the state of human rights in Iran and U.S. policy are Fakhteh Zamani, director of The Defence of Azerbaijani Political Prisoners in Iran; Roya Boroumand, executive director of the Boroumand Foundation for Human Rights in Iran; and Heba El-Shazli, Regional Program Director for the Middle East at the A-F-L-C-I-O Solidarity Center.voa
, Voice of a Nation
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