Rights activists beaten and raped in Iran, says UN
Human rights activists in Iran are subjected to beatings with batons, mock hangings, rape, sleep deprivation, and threats that family members will be raped or killed, a UN rights investigator said in a report released on Thursday.
The UN special rapporteur on human rights in Iran, Ahmed Shaheed, said in a report to the UN General Assembly that Iranian authorities undermined press freedoms, watched some journalists constantly and detained and persecuted others unfairly.
The authorities recently banned domestic news outlets from reporting on the impact of economic sanctions imposed on the Islamic Republic of Iran, Shaheed said.
The Iranian currency has plunged in the past few weeks, sparking street protests. Officials from the United States and other Western countries blame the drop on a combination of economic mismanagement and sanctions.
Iran is under UN, US and European Union sanctions for refusing to halt nuclear enrichment, which Western powers and their allies say is part of a plan to amass the capability to produce nuclear weapons. Tehran denies the charge, saying its atomic work is for medicine and generating electricity.
Shaheed said Iranian authorities executed at least 223 people in the first six months of this year, most of them for drug-related offenses. A large number of those executed were convicted at unfair trials.
About 670 people were executed in Iran in 2011, according to Shaheed.
The report provides a deeply troubling picture of the overall human rights situation in the Islamic Republic of Iran, including many concerns which are systemic in nature, he said.
Shaheed, a former foreign
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