Europe must not turn a blind eye to Iran’s human rights abuses

Amnesty International has just published a 94-page report entitled “Caught in a web of repression: Iran’s human rights defenders under attack.” It details 45 specific instances of what the organization has described as a “vicious crackdown” coinciding with the supposedly moderate presidency of Hassan Rouhani, who begins his second term in office this week.

The overall takeaway is that Iranian authorities have repeatedly diminished the standards by which they accuse and convict activists and dissenters of national security crimes, while also increasing the severity of punishments that are meted out to those same people. The abusive nature of those punishments was reinforced by new revelations that emerged alongside the Amnesty International report, mainly regarding the Islamic Republic’s notorious overuse of the death penalty.

Iran has long maintained world-leading rates of execution, and the violence and repression of the past few years have been reflected in a pattern of hangings that includes periodic spikes during which dozens of people are put to death in a single month. Last month saw just such a spike, with at least 101 death sentences being carried out, to say nothing of those that might have gone ahead in secret.

The Iranian Human Rights Organization announced that the Iranian authorities executed over one hundred people during the month of July. (File photo: Reuters)

In Iran, political prisoners are sentenced to hang with some frequency, usually on the basis of vague, religious charges like “enmity against God” or “insulting the sacred.”

Repressive, theocratic regimehttp://bit.ly/2foziT1