NEWS))))))

U.N. Rights Council Approves Investigator on Iran

Finally after a decade, U.N. Human Rights Council authorized a special investigator on Iran on March 24 to examine reports of excessive use of death penalty, executions by stoning and inhumane treatment of political opponents. “The United States and other partners are gravely concerned about the situation in Iran, where respect for fundamental human rights has deteriorated dramatically in recent years,” U.S. Ambassador Eileen Chamberlain Donahoe said during council debate in Geneva. “Today we have been able to see the council respond to a chronic, severe human rights violator, which is Iran, and we’re very pleased at this development,” Donahoe said later. The council voted 22–7 with 14 abstentions for the resolution, proposed by Sweden, to appoint a special rapporteur on human rights in Iran. U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, in a report to the Human Rights Council on March 14, called on the Iranian regime “to fully guarantee freedom of expression and assembly and to open up greater space for human rights lawyers and activists.” In other news the Canadian Parliament has condemned human rights violations in Iranian regime. The petition was introduced by Liberal MP and former Justice Minister Irwin Cotler in the House of Commons which was unanimously adopted last week by the Committee on Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on International Human Rights. The motion condemns “the deteriorating crisis in human rights” in Iran under the clerical regime, saying the regime is “engaged in widespread and systematic assaults on the human rights of its own people, including a state-orchestrated wave of arrests, detentions, beatings, torture, disappearances, and executions.”It also points out that “the rate of executions in Iran has dramatically escalated in 2011.” “The human rights crisis in Iran be a priority for Canadian foreign policy,” the motion says. It also calls on the government of Canada to “sanction the major human rights violators responsible for the ordering of, and complicity in, the wanton executions and massive assaults on human rights, and put them on notice that they will be held accountable before the law.”

Female political prisoner in Iran in coma after denial of medical treatment

Zahra Jabbari a political prisoner has gone into coma and transferred to a hospital on Saturday after she was refused

medical treatment by the regime’s agents in prison for her critical heart condition. Zahra Jabbari, who was also imprisoned in the 1980s, was arrested for having family ties

with members of the main opposition People’s Mojahedin Organization of Iran (PMOI/MEK) in Camp Ashraf, in

Iraq. She is diagnosed with a serious heart condition and acute rheumatism, but has been refused medical treatment on the orders of Abbas Jafari Dolatabadi, the regime’s prosecutor in Tehran, and interrogators in prison.

Behnoud Ramezani’s Brutal Beatings by Regime Forces Resulted in Death

Daneshjoo News reported on March 23^rd that Behnoud Ramezani , a second term student at Nooshiravani University of Technology in Babol, was killed on the night of the Iranian Fire Festival charshanbe souri at the hands of basij forces in Tehran. His body was eventually delivered to his family two days after his death, under the condition that he be buried outside of Tehran. The two initial forensic reports described the cause of death as “multiple blows to the head by a hard object”. The “final” cause of death was announced by the Iranian regime as a result of “explosion of a hand grenade”. Security forces banned any burial ceremonies for Behnoud Ramezani in Tehran, so this 19 year old studetn, was finally buried on Friday, March 18th, in his native village of Gharakhil in the province of Ghaem Shahr.