Iran is evading and ignoring fresh allegations from United Nations human rights organizations, Arabic and Iranian-opposition media outlets charged on Monday (Arabic link), saying this is not the first time Tehran has ignored such accusations.
Ilham Amin Zada, one of the Iranian president’s advisors, responded by saying that global actors were hypocritical in dealing with human rights violations. Her failure to directly answer the claims angered Al-Arab newspaper (Arabic link), which stressed Iran had once again “hung the human rights charges on a hanger of world hostility.”
In an interview to the pro-governmental Fars news agency, Zada emphasized Iran’s guarantee of minority rights in its territory.
However, the Iranian opposition website Hrana (Persian link) reported Iranian that security forces in the west of the country killed two Ahwazi Arabs who were protesting against the regime over the weekend. Moreover, 16 converts from the same minority were arrested last week during a Koran class in the Shekara district of Ahwaz city.
Like most of the ethnic minorities in Iran, the Ahwazi, who mostly live in the southwestern provinces of Iran, have historically suffered from economic, political, and cultural discrimination from the Iranian regime. According to a report of the Iranian Human Rights Activists News Agency:
Numerous men from Iran’s Ahwazi Arab minority have been arrested by Iranian security forces after converting to Sunni Islam. The Shia Iranian government has been alarmed by the rise of Sunni Islam among the Ahwazi Arabs in the traditionally Shia-majority Khuzestan province.
Analysts who spoke to Al-Arab believe that the Iranian regime is trying to avoid its human rights obligations, especially after recently-leaked information that claim the regime is losing control in the country because of the conflict between conservatives and reformists in light of the economic sanctions imposed on Iran. The survival attempts of the Iranian regime come at the expense of human rights.
The last UN report highlighted the ongoing persecution of non-Muslims in Iran. The report chronicles the closure of churches and the arrests of “their pastors for holding services in Persian or for allegedly ministering to Iranians from Muslim backgrounds.” Tehran has also cracked down on Christian community websites, and Christian converts have been expelled from Iranian universities. The report documents the lack of due process afforded religious and ethnic minorities across the spectrum in Iran, ranging from Jews to Baha’is to Sunni Arabs to Armenians and Kurds.
In addition to the failure of Rouhani to improve the treatment of minorities in Iran, women still face significant discrimination and executions in Iran have increased during his term in office.
[Photo: Kappazeta / flickr]