Crumbs of human rights

I n the Western world we are used to the process that women or the partners together decide on whether to have kids, how many of them and over what period. Iranian women have exercised the same rights. But if the parliament adopts two new bills (Bill 446 and Bill 315) within the next few weeks, politicians will determine women’s family life in the future. These bills would mean taking several steps back regarding ending discrimination against women . www.amnesty.nl Let’s examine the two bills in more details. The so-called Bill 446 (or as its full title says “ The Bill to Increase Fertility Rates and Prevent Population Decline”) concentrates on methods as to how a rapid increase in the Iranian population could be reached, not taking into account the threats, which this bill would impose on women’s sexual and reproductive health. This bill would restrict women’s access to modern contraceptive methods and proscribe spreading information about them. It would also demolish sta

For years, the Iranian regime has talked about a giant Intranet that the government wants to build for all of its citizens, which would isolate the Iranian cyberspace from the rest of the world. The country already has one of the world’s toughest Internet censorship regimes: it routinely blocks thousands of websites deemed offensive, immoral or threatening to the country’s national security. Not long ago, the government unveiled its next step in their efforts to control ordinary people’s online activities: it launched an Iran-only search engine called “Yooz” . www.yooz.ir According to the project manager, Mehdi Naghavi the domestic search engine will help Iranians circumvent the US-led economic sanctions  and will introduce the Persian web to academia. But as always, the pervasive filtering and the harsh restrictions have had an unintended consequence: large numbers of Iranians internet users have become skilled in using various circumvention technologies such as VPNs

Having opposing views than that of the government is quite dangerous in Iran. Let me take the example of the 2009 presidential election, after which several hundreds of people were arrested. Among them were prominent reformist politicians, human rights defenders, journalists and students. www.aljazeera.com But how did that happen? In 2009 Iranian people were about to appoint their president for the next four years, after the controversial presidency of ultra-conservative Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.  In the previous four years, the inflation had risen and the property values, especially in the capital, had increased sharply. Moreover, Mr Ahmadinejad focussed on Iran's nuclear program, which resulted in the United Nations’s sanctions on the Iranian government. So in the election of 12 June 2009, three new candidates, running beside Mr Ahmadinejad, promised to change the current economic and social situation and bring reforms, namely:  - Mir-Hossein Mousavi , a reformi

Since the UN Human Rights Council’s Universal Periodic Review in last October, when Iran had the opportunity to declare what actions it has taken to fulfil its treaty obligations and to note other states’ recommendations on how to improve its human rights records, nothing has changed. Inequality and discrimination remained major problems, which can be caught out in relation to both ethnical and religious minorities. Members of religions not recognised by the constitution are persecuted and their rights are still being systematically violated in the country.  A good example for that is the Baha’i community. Various discriminatory measures have been applied in various parts of the public arena against them, amongst other things; the regime barred Baha’is from accessing higher education in universities by considering them “un-islamic” . The authorities have also targeted the members’ private homes and sacred sites. A Baha’i family in the city of Yazd reported that security forces