Iranian Nobel Peace Prize Shirin Ebadi* reports on the current situation in IranOn the evening of the Iranian presidential election I went to Madrid to participate in a seminar which had been scheduled six months before. On Sunday (June 14th) I was about to board the plane for Tehran while friends were urging me to go to Geneva instead so that the voice of the Iranian people could be heard at the United Nations Human Rights Council. So I did. In any case, I was still going to return home to Iran, where speaking from the inside is impossible and state censorship always has the final say. Indeed, in ten days time I shall still be returning home to my husband, children and friends, and I know all too well that I could get arrested or detained. As the Persian proverb says: “My blood is not more colorful than the blood of other people”.
Meanwhile, the authorities in Iran have detained lawyer Fattah Soltani, my first assistant and a founder member of our Human Rights Defenders Center. Simultaneously, Reza Tajik the journalist in charge of our website was arrested at his house while seven individuals who cooperate with our network were also detained. The families of those nine human rights defenders do not know where they are. Tajik and Soltani may have been taken to the Secret Police section in Aiween prison, north of Tehran. Other activists are still working trying to collect information to publish it on our government-monitored web site. The truth is that this is how things have been ever since December, when they closed our Center. This latest circumstance simply aggravates the situation.
With regard to current developments within Iran, information I am receiving from both reporters and activists on the ground suggests that people are clustering around the Iranian cities of Isfahan, Shiraz, Tabriz, Mashad and Tehran. According to these sources, around 500 people have been detained throughout Iran. The worry is that, if the Iranian authorities continue reacting in this uncouth and stupid manner, we run the risk of sharp clashes taking place. This could provoke the beginnings of civil war in the country. The fact, however, is that to date people have tended towards peaceful protest rather than confrontation. What is more, if the election results are not annulled and new elections undertaken under the watchful eye of international observers and international bodies, the situation cannot be calmed.
In my recent meeting with the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (Ms. Navanethem Pillay), I explained that the Iranian people are raising their voices in peaceful demonstrations in order to express their hopes and demands. I emphasized the importance of ensuring that the government does not continue the use of violence against demonstrators. In the first peaceful demonstration 7 people were killed. And in the attack carried out by the Basij (a widespread militia subordinate to the Iranian Revolutionary Guard) on Sunday, 14th June in a 3 a.m raid on Tehran University, five further people were killed. This included two girls, and injured a large number of students. None of their bodies have as yet been delivered to their families.
I very much hope that Ms. Pillay will dedicate every avenue and channel available to her to stop the Iranian authorities from continuing down this path. What is more, the Human Rights Council must intervene. If intervention to protect the killing of unarmed people who are peacefully demonstrating in the streets of Tehran is not within the prerogative of the Human Rights Council, and is not to be considered a violation of human rights, then I would like someone to explain to me the role of the “Human Rights Council”.
*Shirin Ebadi is an Iranian lawyer. In 2003 she received the Nobel Peace Prize for her outstanding work in favour of democracy and human rights. She was the first ever Iranian citizen to have received the prize.







