Human Rights in Iran

Debate between Matthew Offord and Mark Williams

Tuesday 28th June 2016 Westminster Hall

[Dr Matthew Offord (Hendon) (Con)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered human rights in Iran.

It is a great pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir Edward. I am very pleased that this debate was selected. I am grateful to have the opportunity to discuss the alarming and deteriorating human rights situation in Iran, which has been overlooked recently. This is matter of great importance to many Members, and I am pleased that Members from all political parties in the United Kingdom are here this morning.

For the past two years, discussions about Iran have focused on the country’s clandestine nuclear programme and the international concern over its purpose. I regretted Her Majesty’s Government’s decision to decouple Iran’s human rights abuses and support for terrorism from the nuclear negotiations. I believe that that was a lost opportunity, and that doing so sent the wrong message to Iran.

Figures announced by Iran’s state media and verified by international non-governmental organisations reveal that more than 2,400 people, including many juveniles and women, have been executed in Iran under Rouhani’s three-year tenure. Last year alone there were 966 executions—the highest number in the past two decades. According to the UN special rapporteur for Iran, Dr Ahmed Shaheed, the number of executions was roughly double that of 2010, and 10 times that of 2005.

In July 2015, the deputy director of Amnesty International’s middle east and north Africa programme, Mr Said Boumedouha, said:

“Iran’s staggering execution toll…paints a sinister picture of the machinery of the state carrying out premeditated, judicially-sanctioned killings on a mass scale.”

Almost one year later, the Iranian authorities have maintained a horrifying execution rate that is nothing but state-sanctioned murder. There were 73 executions, including many public hangings, across Iranian cities in May. It is clear that no change can be expected; we should expect this horrific trend to continue.

Those figures show that Iran is not only the world’s No. 1 executioner per capita, but, according to a recent Amnesty International report, one of the few countries that continues to execute juvenile offenders, in blatant violation of the prohibition of the use of the death penalty against people under the age of 18 at the time of their supposed crime. Repressions of these contraventions are enforced by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps and its civic unit, the Basij force, with the active support and encouragement of the Rouhani Government. The law in Iran allows girls as young as nine to be executed for crimes or to be subjected to forced marriage to much older men. That is unacceptable by any international standard, and it is more worrying when one considers the barbaric punishments handed down by Iran’s judiciary. As Iran seeks greater integration with the international community, it is appropriate that we remember those harsh realities. Amnesty International said:

“The surge in executions reveals just how out of step Iran is with the rest of the world when it comes to the use of the death penalty—140 countries worldwide have now rejected its use in law or practice.”

Today, there are those who argue that those abuses are efforts by the hardliners in Iran who control the security organisations and the judiciary to undermine the moderate Rouhani’s reform-minded Government, who seek a more open relationship with the world. I reject that view. Such an assessment fails because it suggests that there are more powerful forces in Iran than the President, which, in turn, means that Rouhani’s position is merely symbolic and that he is thus incapable of initiating reforms. Most importantly, it ignores the fact that neither Rouhani nor his Government have ever publicly condemned and distanced themselves from executions and the use of public hanging. On the contrary, Rouhani has explicitly supported the use of the death penalty. In a speech in April 2004, he described executions as the enforcement of “God’s commandments” and

“laws of the parliament that belongs to the people.”

Those comments show that Rouhani’s views on executions and human rights abuses converge with those of the Supreme Leader and the judiciary. In addition, they expose the fact that there are no forces inside the current ruling theocracy that want to abolish the use of execution and arbitrary arrests. That comes as no surprise to many of us who recognise the real problems with Iran. One should remember that the notion of a moderate force emerging from within the regime is not a new phenomenon. That illusion emerged during the Khatami era in the late 1990s when a policy of appeasement with Tehran based on incentives and economic interests was proposed.

[Mr Mark Williams (Ceredigion) (LD)]

I congratulate the hon. Gentleman on securing this debate. What he is saying is backed up by what happened to Mr Mousavi in the green revolution. Although he was no great reformer, there were glimmers of hope, and they have been dashed. I think that that gentleman is still under house arrest.

[Dr Offord]

The hon. Gentleman is absolutely correct. I pay tribute to the work that he undertakes on this important issue; he attends conferences in other parts of the country. He is correct to say that there have been people who were considered reformers, but whose efforts have been dashed and whose activities have been curtailed, and they have not been able to provide any kind of glimmer of hope. I will talk more about that later in my speech.

In the month after the nuclear deal, there was a wave of arbitrary arrests of human rights defenders, union activists, dissidents, journalists and dual citizens on bogus national security changes, based on propaganda. I will highlight three cases in which the victims received long prison sentences and are under severe pressure by the Iranian authorities in prison. Mr Saleh Kohandel was arrested in 2007 and sentenced to 10 years in prison for supporting Iran’s democratic opposition, the People’s Mujahedin of Iran. His crime was to support a vision of a free and democratic Iran, where torture and capital punishment is abolished. In a letter from the prison in May, Mr Kohandel wrote:

“My only crime, in their view, are my political activities, and for this reason I have on many occasions been transferred to the Ward run by the Intelligence Ministry and spent months under torture in solitary confinement.”

Another case of grave concern is that of Mr Jafar Azimzadeh, a labour activist who has been on hunger strike for nearly two months in Evin prison. He has been protesting against his unjust imprisonment and the suppression of ordinary workers, including the non-payment of their salaries. Mr Azimzadeh’s life is at serious risk, as his condition is deteriorating every day. Just last month, the judiciary in Iran sentenced the human rights defender, Ms Narges Mohammadi, to 16 years in prison. According to reports, she has been detained and denied her medication—a necessary treatment—as a means of torture.

Those three political prisoners and prisoners of conscience are at risk of losing their lives in prison if the international community does not intervene to secure their release. In fact, their condition is so serious that a group of UN human rights experts, including the UN special rapporteur on Iran, recently denounced the denial of adequate medical treatment to political prisoners as unacceptable. They said:

“The condition of several prisoners of conscience with serious health problems has been exacerbated by their continued detention and by repeated refusals to allow their access to the medical facilities and treatment they so urgently require.”