News

While Iran has been in the news in recent months, there has been little coverage of its deteriorating human-rights situation, especially the resurgence in mistreatment of the country's Baha'i community.

That situation came to a head on May 19 with the arrest in the city of Shiraz of 54 Baha'is, mostly young people and, according to reports, all engaged in community service. They were said to have been teaching underprivileged children as part of a local NGO project.

This brings the total number of Baha'is detained since the beginning of 2005 to 125. These people have been held for a period of a few days to several months in what has been described as revolving-door detentions.

There are an estimated 300,000 Baha'is in Iran. Under the Iranian constitution, a number of religions are given a degree of status - but not the Baha'is.

The recent harassment of Baha'is also took the form of 30 mostly negative, and often defamatory, articles that appeared in one of the official Tehran dailies last fall. Asma Jahangir, the United Nations' special rapporteur on Freedom of Religion or Belief, published a statement in March reporting the existence of a confidential letter of Oct. 20, 2005, distributed within the government calling on officials - reportedly on the instructions of Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei - “to identify persons who adhere to the Baha'i faith and monitor their activities.”

The special rapporteur declares that “such monitoring constitutes an impermissible and unacceptable interference with the rights of members of religious minorities.” She expresses concern that the result of such monitoring “will be used as a basis for the increased persecution of, and discrimination against” Baha'is.

She also said that, since taking up her mandate in July of 2004, she had intervened with the government on a number of occasions regarding the treatment of the Baha'i community. And she called on “the government of Iran to refrain from categorizing individuals according to their religion and to ensure that members of all religious minorities are free to hold and practise their religious beliefs, without discrimination or fear.”

For its part, on May 15, the European Union declared its concern about “the increasing number of executions, arbitrary detentions, the growing restrictions on access to information, the increasing violations of freedom of speech and religion, especially concerning the situation of the Sufi and Baha'i communities as well as the intimidation and harassment of human-rights defenders, lawyers and minority groups.”

Clearly, there is a pattern of arbitrary detentions and other forms of harassment and there seems little doubt that this has the approval of the highest levels of government. This development comes at a time when it would appear that a semi-clandestine religious and political group, the Hojjatiya, has re-emerged. Known in the days of the shah for its anti-Baha'i activities (including the destruction of the Baha'i temple in Tehran in 1955), the society was disbanded under Ayatollah Khamenei largely over differences in theology. Reports of its reactivation began to surface in 2002.

Iran would seem to be one of the handful of countries in which the human-rights situation is now visibly deteriorating. In the past several years, Canada has been taking the lead in promoting a UN General Assembly resolution condemning the human-rights situation in Iran and, no doubt, will do so again this year.

More needs to be done. Iran failed in its efforts to be elected to the new UN Human Rights Council. The April resolution establishing the council instructed it to “undertake a universal periodic review, based on objective and reliable information, of the fulfilment by each state of its human-rights obligations and commitments.” The order in which countries will be called before the council has yet to be determined. Given the growth in Iran of violations of international human-rights norms as set out in a variety of UN instruments, Iran should clearly be among the first group of respondents.

Maurice Copithorne is the former United Nations special representative on the human-rights situation in Iran.