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A United Nations General Assembly committee accused Iran on Tuesday of continuing the practice of torture and punishments such as flogging, stoning and amputation of limbs.The UN General Assembly’s Third Committee approved the resolution by a vote of 70 in favour to 48 opposed, with 55 abstentions.The Third Committee expressed “serious concern” at the “continuing harassment, intimidation and persecution of human rights defenders, non-governmental organizations, political opponents, religious dissenters, political reformists, journalists, parliamentarians, students, clerics, academics, webloggers, union members and labour organizers, including through undue restrictions on the freedoms of assembly, conscience, opinion and expression, the threat and use of arbitrary arrest and prolonged detention, targeted at both individuals and their family members, the ongoing unjustified closure of newspapers and blocking of Internet sites and restrictions on the activities of unions and other non-governmental organizations, as well as the absence of many conditions necessary for free and fair elections”.The resolution also denounced the “continuing use of torture and cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment such as flogging and amputations” in Iran and the “continuing of public executions, including multiple public executions, and, on a large scale, of other executions, in the absence of respect for internationally recognized safeguards, and the issuing of sentences of stoning; and, in particular, deplores the execution of persons who were under the age of 18 at the time their offence was committed”. It censured the theocratic government for “violence and discrimination against women and girls in law and in practice”, and accused the hard-line Guardians Council of refusing to take steps to address systemic discrimination and arrests of and violent crackdowns on women exercising their right of assembly.

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Tehran’s public prosecutor’s office is seeking the death penalty for seven individuals accused of producing and distributing pornographic CDs which are banned in Islamic Iran.The judiciary is currently examining three dossiers in which several individuals have been accused of producing and distributing “vulgar CDs”, Judiciary spokesman Jamal Karimi-Rad told reporters on Tuesday.Karimi-Rad, who is also the country’s Minister of Justice, said that 35 individuals had been arrested in relation to the cases and that the prosecutor’s office is seeking the death penalty for seven of them.“We hope to witness theses dossiers being dealt with as soon as possible so that those who try to spread corruption in society … do not feel safe”, he said.The government of ultra-Islamist President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has vowed to enforce “the strict rules of Islam”. Before taking office as president, one of Ahmadinejad’s first decisions as mayor of Tehran was to separate men-only and women-only elevators in the city hall.

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Five men have been hanged in public in Iran’s northern province of Golestan, a state-run daily reported on Monday.The men, identified as Khashayar J., Ismail B., Abolghasem H., Ruhollah T., and Hassan B., were hanged in public inside a stadium on Sunday, the daily Etemaad wrote.They were accused of rape and kidnapping.On Saturday, the French news agency AFP quoted a report in the state-run daily Etemaad Meli as saying that another five men, convicted of drug trafficking, had been hanged in prison in the north-eastern province of Khorasan Razavi on Friday.State media have reported at least 159 hangings in Iran since the start of 2006.

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Religious fundamentalists in Iran are demanding separate university classes for men and women in a drive to impose puritanical Islamic values on the country's campuses.The call - backed by senior figures close to the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei - comes as new statistics show female students outnumbering their male counterparts in a sharp reversal of traditionally masculine-dominated trends.It is being spearheaded by Hojatoleslam Mohammad Mohamadian, a cleric heading the state body representing Mr Khamenei in the nation's universities. Mr Mohamadian warned in a speech that universities were descending into "fashion shows" and urged chancellors to punish students who breached Islamic rules on dress code and gender-mingling. He demanded segregated classes and the evaluation of faculty members on religious and moral grounds to transform the culture."At present the public environment of universities is free and the moral situation is offensive," Mr Mohamadian told a gathering of university administrators. "University chancellors are responsible not just for education and research, but for the religion, beliefs and ideas of students. If one or two out of the minority who deface universities are confronted and severely disciplined, the rest will be warned and change their ways."The demand is in line with a clampdown that has seen CCTV surveillance cameras installed on some campuses. Politically active students have been denied access to courses and large numbers of lecturers forced to retire. Two months ago, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad demanded a purge of liberal and secular lecturers.Iran's Islamic laws already require men and women to sit in different rows in classes and lecture halls. Campus libraries, reading rooms, refectories and halls of residences are also segregated.The higher education ministry is resisting further separation as impractical and unnecessary. However, the proposal has strong support from MPs on the influential parliamentary cultural committee."When the working environment is all-male or all-female, employees and students are liberated from certain distractions," Mousalreza Servati, a committee member, told the ILNA news agency. "In free environments, the possibility exists that when a lady passes, a gentleman likes her face or her behaviour and has it not happened quite often that this interest later results in the wife leaving the husband to marry another man."

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Iran has been banned from international soccer games by the world soccer federation for government interference in the affairs of its national team.The Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA) said in a statement on Thursday that an emergency committee, composed of the FIFA President and one representative of each of the six football confederations, had on Wednesday decided to suspend the Islamic Republic of Iran Football Federation (IRIFF) from all international activity due to “government interference in football matters and violation of Article 17 of the FIFA Statutes”. “The FIFA Emergency Committee took this decision after determining that the IRIFF was not adhering to the principles of the FIFA Statutes regarding the independence of member associations, the independence of the decision-making process of the football governing body in each country and the way in which changes in the leadership of associations are brought about”, the statement said.In August 2006, FIFA and the Asian Football Confederation (AFC) gave the IRIFF a deadline of 15 November to reinstate its elected president, Mohammed Dadgan, and to comply with the relevant provisions of the FIFA Statutes. “This deadline was not met by the IRIFF”.

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One person dies every two hours from drug addiction-related illnesses in Iran, according to new statistics released by the government.Official surveys show that drug smuggling and sales in Iran is approximately a 10-billion-dollar market each year.Previous estimates have put the total number of illegal-drug users in Iran at more than seven million.Iran’s government is under close scrutiny for the level of narcotics found in Iranian cities. Many experts fear that certain departments and officials within the Iranian regime are overseeing foreign narcotics imports.

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Association France Press reported that the Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has said the world is "rapidly becoming Ahmadinejadised" and global leaders have started following in his footsteps, press reports said Tuesday. "I have travelled to all the continents except for one and I know what is going on out there. Everybody is eager to hear the Iranian people's message," the reformist Aftab-Yazd newspaper quoted the president as saying. "The world is rapidly becoming Ahmadinejadised." The austere hardliner said that Iran's "two big missions are constructing the country and introducing a model for humanity." World leaders, he added, had started copying his provincial trips, during which he pledges to create jobs and fight poverty. "When I telephone other leaders, I am told that they are on trips. Their trips are the same as the provincial tours that I have initiated," he said. So far, Ahmadinejad has gone on 21 provincial trips to look into local problems. "This government has risen from people's prayers," he said of his presidential electoral victory. "Someone even told me that he had vowed to say Salavats (a one-line formula to praise the Prophet Mohammed) as many times as my electoral votes count," Ahmadinejad said, referring to his June 2005 shock win by more than 17 million votes over pragmatist cleric Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani. Since rising to power, the president has roused nationalist sentiments and pushed through a populist economic agenda. Ahmadinejad ran on a platform of distributing the country's oil riches, "spreading justice", combatting corruption and vowing a "new Islamic revolution".