Iranian Nobel Peace laureate Shirin Ebadi yesterday called on the UN chief to visit Iran to receive a first-hand account of human rights abuses and warned against sanctions because they would hurt the Iranian people.
Iran’s June 12 election, which secured hardline President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s re-election, plunged Iran into its biggest internal crisis since the 1979 Islamic revolution, exposed deepening divisions in its ruling elite and set off a wave of protests that left 26 people dead.
“I ask UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon to visit Iran,” Ebadi told reporters in Seoul, where she picked up a local peace prize. “He must speak to the families whose members have been arrested or killed.”
Ebadi contends that more than 100 people have been killed.
Ebadi, Iran’s most famous human rights lawyer, was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2003 and has called for UN observers to scrutinize a fresh vote in Iran. Her influence in Iran is seen as limited, analysts said.
In an attempt to uproot the opposition, Iran began two mass trials of more than 100 people, including prominent figures, a French woman and two Iranians working for the British and French embassies in Tehran.
It charged them with spying and assisting a Western plot to overthrow the clerical rule. The US and its European allies have rejected the trials as a “show,” while Ebadi said they were “ridiculous” and must be stopped.
“The trials show that the administration is weak. These mass trials are not in line with the laws of Islam,” she said through a translator.
Meanwhile, an ally of Iranian opposition leader Mirhossein Mousavi said 69 people were killed in the post-election unrest, the Sarmayeh daily said yesterday.
“The names of 69 people who were killed in post-election unrest ... were submitted to parliament for investigation. The report also included the names of about 220 detainees,” Alireza Hosseini Beheshti said.
Judiciary spokesman Alireza Jamshidi said yesterday that more than 4,000 protesters had been arrested nationwide since the vote.
“But 3,700 of them were released in the first week after their arrest,” Jamshidi told a news conference.
Among those still in prison are senior pro-reform politicians, journalists, activists and lawyers.
Parliament speaker Ali Larijani said parliament would carefully review cases of the detainees and those killed in the post-election unrest, the Etemad-e melli newspaper reported yesterday.
Defeated presidential candidate Mehdi Karoubi on Sunday said on his Web site that some protesters, both male and female, had been raped while in detention and that he had written to the head of a powerful arbitration body calling for an investigation.
“Such claims [of rape and abuse of detainees] will be investigated by parliament,” Larijani said.
Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei ordered a prison’s closure last month, citing a “lack of necessary standards” to preserve prisoners’ rights, and police chief Esmail Ahmadi-Moghaddam said some of the protesters held at the Kahrizak detention center had been tortured.
A fire caused by a burst gas pipe yesterday spread to several homes and sent a fireball soaring into the sky outside Malaysia’s largest city, injuring more than 100 people. The towering inferno near a gas station in Putra Heights outside Kuala Lumpur was visible for kilometers and lasted for several hours. It happened during a public holiday as Muslims, who are the majority in Malaysia, celebrate the second day of Eid al-Fitr. National oil company Petronas said the fire started at one of its gas pipelines at 8:10am and the affected pipeline was later isolated. Disaster management officials said shutting the
US Vice President J.D. Vance on Friday accused Denmark of not having done enough to protect Greenland, when he visited the strategically placed and resource-rich Danish territory coveted by US President Donald Trump. Vance made his comment during a trip to the Pituffik Space Base in northwestern Greenland, a visit viewed by Copenhagen and Nuuk as a provocation. “Our message to Denmark is very simple: You have not done a good job by the people of Greenland,” Vance told a news conference. “You have under-invested in the people of Greenland, and you have under-invested in the security architecture of this
UNREST: The authorities in Turkey arrested 13 Turkish journalists in five days, deported a BBC correspondent and on Thursday arrested a reporter from Sweden Waving flags and chanting slogans, many hundreds of thousands of anti-government demonstrators on Saturday rallied in Istanbul, Turkey, in defence of democracy after the arrest of Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu which sparked Turkey’s worst street unrest in more than a decade. Under a cloudless blue sky, vast crowds gathered in Maltepe on the Asian side of Turkey’s biggest city on the eve of the Eid al-Fitr celebration which started yesterday, marking the end of Ramadan. Ozgur Ozel, chairman of the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), which organized the rally, said there were 2.2 million people in the crowd, but
JOINT EFFORTS: The three countries have been strengthening an alliance and pressing efforts to bolster deterrence against Beijing’s assertiveness in the South China Sea The US, Japan and the Philippines on Friday staged joint naval drills to boost crisis readiness off a disputed South China Sea shoal as a Chinese military ship kept watch from a distance. The Chinese frigate attempted to get closer to the waters, where the warships and aircraft from the three allied countries were undertaking maneuvers off the Scarborough Shoal — also known as Huangyan Island (黃岩島) and claimed by Taiwan and China — in an unsettling moment but it was warned by a Philippine frigate by radio and kept away. “There was a time when they attempted to maneuver
RSS