BUDAPEST, 15 February 2005 — Iranian Foreign Minister Kamal Kharrazi reaffirmed yesterday Tehran’s right to enrich uranium for peaceful purposes, despite a fresh warning from Germany that Iran could face sanctions in the UN Security Council over its nuclear program.
“We consider enrichment as part of our legitimate rights,” Kharrazi said at a press conference after meeting his Hungarian counterpart Ferenc Somogyi.
“What remains is how to remove the concerns that Iran does not divert towards nuclear weapons,” Kharrazi said.
He said the International Atomic Energy Agency, the UN’s nuclear watchdog, could inspect “wherever they wish, any time they want” to make certain that Tehran’s use of uranium enrichment is not used to make nuclear weapons. “Iran has been always pushing for the elimination of nuclear weapons. Basically this means that it is forbidden based on our ideology, based on our Islamic thinking it is forbidden to produce and use nuclear weapons as well as other weapons of mass destruction,” Kharrazi said.
German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer, who will meet Kharrazi tomorrow in Berlin, said over the weekend that if Iran restarted its uranium enrichment program, Tehran would have to face the sanctions from the UN Security Council.
The pressure by Germany is part of a mix of “carrots and sticks” from the international community to convince Iran to give up uranium enrichment — which the United States believes Tehran is using as a cover for an atomic weapons program.
Meanwhile, Nobel Peace Prize laureate Shirin Ebadi accused Iran’s hard-line judiciary yesterday of doing all it could to prevent human rights lawyers from defending political prisoners.
At a news conference in Tehran, Ebadi said: “Judge and lawyer are each one wing of the angel of justice, but one of them has been amputed.”
Ebadi, who heads a group of Iranian human rights lawyers, said: “Lawyers have been in and out of jail. I have also been in prison. They keep summoning me here and there. “I have been subject to threats for 10 years,” she said, adding that she had again received a summons and “the judge himself did not know why”.
Ebadi said those detained by the legal authorities faced an impossible task in choosing a human rights lawyer to defend them. “How can they decide which lawyer can appear you in a case and which cannot?” she asked, giving the example of Roozbeh Mir-Ebrahimi, arrested last autumn in a crackdown on journalists and freed at the end of 2004.
Standing next to her, Mir-Ebrahimi told the press conference: “My family asked Ebadi and Mohammad Seifzadeh to defend me but I was told in prison that with the charge against me I risked 15 years in prison, and that with these (lawyers) I would receive 25 years.
“My interrogator forced me to reject them and said that they were only serving their own interests.”
