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.
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