TEHRAN, 25 July 2005 — Iran’s regime used to subject its prisoners to solitary confinement and torture, the hard-line judiciary admitted in an unprecedented report carried by the student news agency ISNA yesterday.
The regime also resorted to prolonged detention without trial and the extraction of confessions under duress but these were now all things of the past, judiciary chief Abbas Ali Alizadeh said.
“We’ve taken steps and we can proudly state that all these failings have now disappeared,” Alizadeh said. “Iranian prisons are among the best in the world.”
Judiciary spokesman Jamal Karimi Rad added: “These actions are part of the past,” crediting “great progress” in human rights.
Tehran is criticized by international human rights watchdogs for the persistence of torture in its jails.
Relations between Tehran and Ottawa are still reeling from the July 2003 death in custody of Iranian-Canadian photojournalist Zahra Kazemi and Iran has largely rejected criticism as interference in its internal affairs, but in April 2004 the hard-line judiciary implicitly recognized such practices by publishing a flyer ordering an end to torturing, blindfolding or humiliating prisoners.
This flyer, which was revived nearly point by point in a law forbidding torture and guaranteeing civil rights, spurred the creation of a judiciary civil rights commission, which created the report. The commission reported that some prisons continued to use blindfolds and “one police commander acknowledged some cases in which prisoners were hit.”
Some prisoners also had one square meter (11 square feet) of cell space, but “today each detainee has about 12 square meters” said Alizadeh.
At the Rajae Shahr prison west of Tehran, 1,400 prisoners were awaiting a court judgment when the report was released.
Among them was one 73-year-old woman who had been jailed for four months because she couldn’t pay a bail bond against her house and another woman who was put behind bars in place of her husband, who was on the run.
The report said an unspecified number of women had committed suicide in that prison, and also claimed to be investigating possible cases of rape among young girls and women in the prison. The report was to be delivered to judiciary chief Ayatollah Mahmood Hashemi Shahroudi.
After visiting prisons, vice squad detention centers, the Intelligence Ministry, police and army intelligence, the Defense Ministry and the Revolutionary Guards, the commission determined that all centers should be placed under a central authority. One Revolutionary Guards center refused access to the commission.
Meanwhile, Iranian human rights lawyer and 2003 Nobel Peace Prize winner Shirin Ebadi warned yesterday that her client, jailed journalist Akbar Ganji, is in failing health and complained she had not been allowed to visit him. Ganji, 46, an outspoken critic of the government, jailed in 2001, was rushed to hospital last Sunday after a five-week hunger strike. His wife said on Friday that his health was deteriorating.
