Iran Focus

London, 11 Mar – Iran is maneuvering with its allies at the U.N. Human Rights Council to block Western attempts to renew the mandate of a special investigator into Tehran’s human rights record – a man who has drawn contemptuous criticism from the regime for highlighting abuses, CNSNews.com reported on Friday.

For the past five years Ahmed Shaheed, a former foreign minister of the Maldives, has been an independent “special rapporteur” on the human rights situation in Iran, and over that period Tehran has denied multiple requests for him to visit the country.

The Italian Helsinki Committee for human rights supports Albania’s attitude towards Iranian dissidents, condemns Tehran’s demonization campaign.

Statement by Italian Helsinki Committee for Human Rights:

The issue of Iranian dissidents living at Camp Liberty, Iraq is a pressing humanitarian issue that deserves our immediate attention. They have been subject to several deadly attacks by terrorists affiliated with the Iranian regime and Iraqi security forces during the tenure of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, resulting to 140 being killed and more 1300 injured. The last attack on these defenseless refugees took place on October 29, 2015, resulting in the deaths of 24 of them. In this light, the efforts of the government of Albania to host the Iranian dissidents are commendable.

Nahid Hematabadi, a renowned Iranian opera singer, has written a tragic account of the death of art and music in Iran after fundamentalist clerics hijacked a people’s revolution in 1979.

She looks back at her childhood where she in the early 1950s I began learning the violin. After studying music and singing for Tehran Music Academy, she performed as a soloist for Iran’s State Opera in numerous events. Yet, now she is leaving in exile in Europe and laments what has happened to her homeland under the mullahs of Tehran. She writes that all the artists who refused to succumb to fundamentalists’ restrictions faced all types of crackdowns, deprivations, and purges. Many were thrown into such poverty that they were only able to make a living as street vendors. Others were thrown behind bars. Various writers and poets who refused to back down from their beliefs were murdered.