Persecuted Iranian Rights Defender Gets International Support
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NEW YORK, Aug 16 (OneWorld) - Rights advocacy groups here are calling for the United Nations to support human rights defenders in Iran.
Last week, Iranian authorities threatened to close the Center for the Defense of Human Rights (CDHR) in Tehran, saying that it was an illegal organization. The Tehran-based group was co-founded by the leading rights activist and Nobel peace laureate Dr. Shirin Ebadi some four years ago. Officials said Ebadi and others could be tried in the court of law because they ran the Center without obtaining a "proper permit" from the government. For their part, activists have maintained that they had applied for the permit in 2002, but the government never responded despite several additional follow-up requests. Legal experts point out that a permit is not required by law in Iran, but in this case it is needed only because the Interior Ministry has imposed the practice of obtaining one. "Under Iran's constitution," according to Ebadi, "non-governmental organizations (NGOs) that obey the law and do not disrupt public order do not need a permit." Ebadi, who is the first-ever woman from a Muslim country to win the Nobel Peace Prize, has been imprisoned and harassed in the past for her fierce advocacy campaigns for the rights of women and children. International human rights activists say the government's charge against Ebadi and other members of the Center appear nothing more than an excuse. "It's an attempt to silence Ebadi," said Sarah Leah Whitson of New York-based Human Right Watch. "It's a huge setback for protecting human rights in Iran." "If Ebadi is threatened for defending human rights," Whitson added, "then no one who works for human rights can feel safe from government prosecution." In the past four years, Ebadi's organization has provided legal help to hundreds of journalists and students facing prosecution for criticizing government policies. As a result of her bold stand on human rights, Ebadi has faced several death threats on the one hand, and garnered a great deal of respect and admiration, on the other. Last year in January, when a court served her with a summons, people took to the streets in protest because there were no specific charges against her. The public pressure forced the court to withdraw the summons. Ebadi seems to have won as much popularity among human rights defenders in the outside world as she has in her own country. "I have never seen her kind of courage," says Eleanor Smeal of the Feminist Majority Foundation, a prominent women's rights organization in the United States. "She has risked her life for women and children. We cannot let her down." Smeal's group has launched a worldwide signature campaign on its Web site urging the UN to ask the Iranian government to respect international human rights principles by declaring Ebadi's work for human rights defense as legal. Both the Feminist Majority Foundation and Human Rights Watch have said they want the Iranian authorities to respect the principles laid out in the UN Declaration on Human Rights Defenders, which was unanimously adopted by the General Assembly in 1998. The Declaration not only recognizes the rights of individuals "to promote and to strive for the protection and realization of human rights and fundamental freedoms" and to "develop and discuss new human rights ideas and principles," but also the right to "complain about the policies and actions of individual officials and government bodies with regard to violations of human rights." It also calls on states to take "all necessary measures" to ensure the protection of human rights defenders against "any violence, threats, retaliation, adverse discrimination, pressure, or any other arbitrary actions, as a consequence of their legitimate efforts to promote human rights." The two groups urged the Iranian government to allow Ebadi and other human rights defenders to carry out their peaceful activities without harassment and fear of prosecution. "A government like Iran's, which professes to protect human rights, should welcome independent monitoring organizations like the CDHR, rather than seek to muzzle them," said Human Rights Watch's Whitson. Ebadi is one of only seven living women who have won the Nobel Peace Prize. |
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