UNITED NATIONS—Violations of human rights and oppression of minorities and women in Iran have worsened under President Hassan Rouhani, who took office as a moderate promising to improve the lives of Iranians, a United Nations inspector said.
The Rouhani administration executed at least 753 people last year, the most since 2002, with 252 killed in the last 10 weeks, Ahmed Shaheed, the UN’s special rapporteur on human rights in Iran, said on Monday in Geneva.
Shaheed, a former foreign minister of Maldives, presented to the UN’s human-rights council his report, which expresses “serious concern” about draft legislation that would limit women’s economic opportunities and appears “to expand government influence over the media, civil society, political organizations and the legal community.”
Rouhani’s failure to make good on his promises to improve human rights since taking office in 2013 may indicate his limited powers in the face of conservative hard-liners who resist giving up the pursuit of nuclear weapons in exchange for a sanctions relief deal with the US and five world powers.
Rouhani’s top negotiator is meeting US Secretary of State John Kerry in Switzerland and officials of other world powers this week in an effort to meet an end-of-March goal for a framework political agreement.
“In my view, the overall situation has worsened,” Shaheed told reporters before addressing the council, pointing to a surge in executions and legislation that he said would “further undermine” operations of nongovernmental organizations, “the legal community, the space for political parties and for human-rights defenders.”
While Iran justifies capital punishment as necessary to stop crimes such as drug trafficking, it’s illegal under international law to carry out “executions for drug-related crimes, adultery, sodomy, alcohol consumption, and for vaguely worded national security offenses, such as corruption on earth,” Shaheed told the council.
Religious minorities continue to face discrimination, arrest and arbitrary detention, Shaheed wrote in the report. As of January 1, at least 92 Christians remained in detention, allegedly for their faith and activities. About 100 Baha’is were detained.
The Iranian judiciary and lawmakers also are considering draft laws and policies that “further limit economic opportunities for women” and segregate them from the workplace, Shaheed wrote, calling for “high priority” on amending such considerations.
Last September Iran adopted a law banning Iranian women from working as waitresses in coffee shops, citing the need to preserve their modesty. Last year Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei urged officials to take steps to encourage Iranians to marry younger and have more babies.
The Iranian government criticized Shaheed for reporting on laws that have yet to be enacted and accused him of bias for not basing his report on “authentic information” from the government’s missions in Geneva and in New York.
Last week Shahindokht Molaverdi, Iran’s top official on women’s rights, said the women’s movement in Iran is “still slow and imbalanced” because of international sanctions that create obstacles such as “conflicts, insecurity, shortage of financial resources and investment.”
It will be “impossible to reach a comprehensive gender balance” until “unjust sanctions” are lifted, Molaverdi said in her statement to a session of the UN General Assembly last week.
Bloomberg News/ TNS
Image credits: AP/Vahid Salem