Human Rights

Lord Avebury Excerpts

Thursday 2nd December 2010 Lords Chamber

[Lord Avebury]

My Lords, in my three minutes’ worth in Tuesday’s debate on Iran I gave notice of two issues for today. The first was the advice given by the UN rapporteur on extrajudicial executions, Philip Alston, on how to improve the special procedures system of communication, a matter that I do not think was dealt with by the Conservative Party commission. I mentioned then his proposal for dealing with countries with consistently poor levels of co-operation or meaningful engagement, to which I added an alternative on which I would like an answer from the Minister today.

Mr Alston made five other proposals, including an examination of the effectiveness of the communications system, better integration of the work of the SPs and modernisation of their technology of communication. There is not time to mention them all but they are all worth consideration. Can we urge the Equality and Human Rights Commission to pick them up and, now that Mr Alston has ended his six-year stint as special rapporteur, to put him on a list of potential candidates to carry out the work? How else does my noble friend think that we might go about improving the sclerotic and byzantine edifice of the special procedures?

The second issue that I left for today was that of Iran's minorities. The noble Lord, Lord Alton, concentrated on some aspects of the treatment of minorities. The Kurds have always suffered extreme persecution in Iran, as in other parts of the region. Agents of the regime assassinated their great leader Abdul Rahman Ghassemlou at a meeting to discuss peace in Vienna in 1988, and then his successor Dr Sadegh Sharafkandi was killed at the Mykonos restaurant in Berlin in 2001. In September I asked the Minister, Alistair Burt, if he would press the Austrians to release the files on Ghassemlou’s murder, as the Germans did in the case of Sharafkandi. I would be grateful if my noble friend could tell me what progress is being made on that issue.

Regarding the situation of the Kurds, there are 21 Iranian Kurds on death row today, including a woman, Miss Zeinab Jalalian, who was convicted of “mobarabeh”—“enmity against God”. The Kurdish Human Rights Project—I declare an interest as president of that organisation—says that after her arrest in 2008 she was held incommunicado in a Ministry of Detention facility for eight months before being sentenced to death by the Kermanshah Revolutionary Court. During her brief trial, which lasted for only a few minutes, she was barred from access to her lawyer and was told to “shut up” by the sentencing judge after making a plea to say goodbye to her family.

On the Baha’is, mentioned by the noble Lord, Lord Alton, the High Commissioner for Human Rights wrote personally to the Iranian authorities asking for an explanation of the circumstances in which seven members have been held on trumped-up charges from May 2008. They have now been sentenced in totally irregular court proceedings to 10 years’ imprisonment, in effect for being members of the Baha’i faith. I declare an interest as acting chair of the Baha’i All-Party Parliamentary Group.

In another case, of many, three Baha’is have recently begun a fourth year in detention for the “crime” of their participation in an education programme for underprivileged children in Shiraz. They were sentenced despite a report by an inspector of the Office of the Representative of the Supreme Leader that pointed to their innocence. They have been held for three years so far, not in a regular prison but in the holding cells of the Shiraz office of the Ministry of Intelligence where they have no windows, beds or chairs and have only recently been given mattresses. All three have injuries for which they have received inadequate medical attention.

Minorities in Pakistan are having an extremely hard time also. The Parliamentary Human Rights Group has just published a report on the situation of Ahmadis in Pakistan, which presents a stark picture of the discrimination against that community and the lack of protection from the state against their enemies, the extremist Khatme Nabuwwat, an organisation that openly incites religious hatred, creating an atmosphere that leads to assassination and even to well organised massacres of Ahmadis at Friday prayers in their mosques.

Bodies such as the Sipah-e Sahaba and Lashkar-e Jhangvi are violent anti-Shia organisations that were banned by Musharraf in 2002 but are still freely operating in Pakistan, in spite of their known associations with al-Qaeda. They relentlessly target minorities such as the Hazaras, a small Shia minority in Baluchistan, in killings and suicide bombings. An estimated 400 of the Hazaras have been killed and 1,000 injured in the last few years. Thousands more have abandoned their homes and businesses and sought asylum abroad in places such as Canada and Australia.

In Karachi, too, there is a wave of violence, directed against the Ahmadis, Christians, Shia and the MQM, a political party representing the descendants of those who crossed over from India at the time of partition. Nobody is ever arrested for these crimes. We need to know whether the Government, the European Union, the UN or, better still, all of them, will persuade President Zardari and the federal Government to act firmly on the impunity that has been enjoyed by terrorist groups and their extremist ideological allies.