Arab Human Rights Organisations Support the Iranian People

international | rights, freedoms and repression | other press Friday July 31, 2009 14:42 by Hypatia

Here are extracts from a statement by 42 Arab Human Rights Organisations. They make clear their solidarity with the Iranian People and their opposition to the repression carried out by the Iranian Regime. Full text at link.

We, the undersigned human rights organizations and advocates from the Arab region, express our condemnation of the brutal repression undertaken by the Iranian authorities against the Iranian people involved in peaceful demonstrations and protests against the course and outcome of the Iranian presidential elections. The repressive acts led to the death of dozens and the detention of thousands, including members of political opposition, journalists, workers and human rights defenders. The detainees have been subject to maltreatment and torture intended to force them to make false confessions or to give statements to be broadcast by the state media to distort the image of the popular uprising. The Iranian government has used the latter statements to support its fallacious claim that any dissonance or upheaval around the elections is merely the result of a foreign ploy to target Iran.

We regret that the Iranian people, who made enormous sacrifices to rid of themselves of the Shah, must once more suffer through the equally tyrannical rule of the Islamic Republic. The worst violations characterizing the previous dark era have been incessantly resumed through torture, arbitrary detentions, extra-judicial killing, and suppression of the political opposition, and social cultural freedoms - under the cloak of religious notions and authorities, which Iran’s ruling clerical elites take shelter.

Immediate measures should be taken to defuse the current crisis.

• The government must release all detainees arrested since the post-election crisis began, and conduct fair investigations concerning claims of torture and ill-treatment. Perpetrators of such human rights violations must be prosecuted by Iranian courts.

• The Basij militia, or plainclothes vigilantes, widely used by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) to terrorize and brutalize the population into submission must be dissolved.

• Independent investigations should be conducted concerning cases of likely extra-judicial murders and death sentences. International human rights missions should be allowed to enter the country as a first step to combat impunity with respect to crimes that have been committed.

• Journalists and human rights defenders must be allowed to carry out their work unhindered, and government-ordered interruptions and surveillance of phone and internet communications must be halted.