The challenge facing human rights advocates has always been formidable: to scale the seemingly insurmountable walls of the sovereign state, to reach into its dark and cloistered domestic domains, and to lend a helping hand to courageous but lonely women and men in the clutches of its security apparatus. When the state is fanatically guided by a sacrosanct ideology, the task becomes infinitely more difficult.

The volcano- like eruption of politicized Islam (Islamism) added a new layer of repression and persecution to the already dense depository of historical injustices. Now the life of the individual could be sacrificed to safeguard...

The official Sunni Islam, which claims the allegiance of the majority of Muslims in the world, has only the Prophet Muhammad, who is considered to be the last messenger of God on earth. The orthodox Sunnis grapple with complex sets of traditions that his leading followers had developed in his name. In contrast, the Shiite religious landscape in Iran is more imaginitively crowded. The Twelver Shiites have erected a hierarchy of Imams, who as the direct twelve descendants of the Prophet had theoretically inherited a touch of prophetic charisma, if not divine attributes, leaving behind ponderous legacies of sacrosanct words....

The Shiite ulema’s understanding of the medieval Islamic laws meshed with the overreaching power of the contemporary state, determining the applicability of the death penalty, its frequency of use, and the methods of executions. In 1979, many of the Shah’s generals and high civil servants (and later radical participants in the revolution) heard for the first time in their lives the deadly concepts of the Ayatollah’s justice. As capital crimes, the mofsed fel arz (one who sows corruption on earth) and mohareb (warring against God) called for divine retribution, now meted out by the authoritarian modern state. The clerics used...

Article 38 of the Constitution proudly prohibited torture in the Islamic Republic of Iran, but the regime’s interrogators cavalierly resorted to the most familiar forms of torture, mainly for the purpose of extracting confessions. Prison wardens also continued inflicting pain on the captives for disciplinary punishment—or just out of sadism. Islamic punishments like flogging and amputation of limbs and fingers revived ancient forms of torture and gave them judicial standings within the nation-state.

Paya’s memoirs enable us to see a distinction between the early period when he was in prison and a later period when the clerics established their...

Forced Islamization was a main cause of violations of the right to liberty and security of person. Over the years, the Islamists formed a host of official and semiofficial groups, hoping to impose strict Islamic morality on the reluctant middle class. The end proved illusive, but the means generated considerable insecurity in everyday lives of many Iranians.

Again, I begin with Paya. The most difficult thing for Paya to accept was how this unfortunate turn of events happened so soon after the revolution in which he placed some hope. Taken blindfolded into the prison walkway, he murmured to himself, “Islamic...

Under the rubric of the right to a fair trial, the UN Special Representative Galindo Pohl often, and appropriately, discussed “the administration of justice” in the Islamic Republic. Following his lead, this chapter will examine the lack of due process of law by looking at a few judicial cases that revealed many of the peculiarities of the Islamic court system.

In 1979, the clerics whom Khomeini appointed as Islamic judges conducted “Islamic revolutionary trials” in a rather haphazard way in applying what they understood to be Shiite penal law. In 1982, the Majlis (parliament) inserted the ancient judicial concepts in...

The architects of the Islamic Republic were the first religious-political activists to take over a Western-style authoritarian state and transform it into a theocracy. Once in control of the state’s coercive apparatus, they introduced an all- encompassing project to re-Islamicize the society. Inflicting a particular curse of the religious state, the Islamic Republic parted ways here with other authoritarian states. Persuasion, education, propaganda, intimidation, arrest, torture, and execution were the means to achieve the goals of re-Islamization. This chapter uses the information contained in prison memoirs to illustrate how the new rulers carried out Islamization in prisons with the intent...

Between 1984 and the prison massacre of 1988, there was a period of relative improvement in prison conditions. The significance of that period—which prisoners called the “intermission”—lies in the fact that some prisoners used the opportunity to try to reassert their secular identity and regain a measure of respect for their freedom of conscience. It needs to be emphasized that in the massacre, the violation of the right to life was a consequence of the egregious violation of the right to freedom of thought and conscience. For this reason I discuss the massacre in this category and not...

For most of the 1980s, the Special Representative’s attention remained focused on the plight of Baha’is, who suffered more than any other community during the period under consideration. There was no discussion of other religious minorities, as the official discrimination against them was overshadowed, in international human rights reports, by the regime’s brutality toward Baha’is. Only in the early 1990s did the international human rights community begin to pay attention to the situation of other religious minorities.

The change of regime in 1979 introduced new patterns of violations, creating new victims and adding new rationalizations in a constant attempt to...

In their earlier responses to the UN’s inquiries, reports, and resolutions, the Iranian regime’s diplomats vacillated between ideological/religious exaltations and outright denials that were sometimes expressed in a calmer, bureaucratic language. Perhaps the most salient feature of the first period (1980s) was the use of inflammatory rhetoric, denouncing the United States and its European allies for sponsoring critical resolutions on human rights violations in Iran. The hysteric Islamist political discourse for domestic consumption largely shaped the diplomatic responses to the international community. Two examples will suffice to show the tone of the official responses in the early years of the...

Ayatollah Khomeini died midway through two decades of clerical dominance. The acute period of human rights crisis lasted from 1980 until 1988. Then began the chronic period, during which the regime denied the rights of the mostly intimidated citizens without many cases of active violations being reported. Violations produced relatively fewer visible victims. The relative quiescence in the arena of political executions signified not an improved situation but a dormant state for human rights of many Iranians. During the first phase of acute human rights crises, numerous violations were reported because many Iranians, especially the politically mobilized young people, exercised...

Reynaldo Galindo Pohl visited Tehran three times between 1990 and 1992 and met with clerical jurists and the security officials in charge of the Intelligence Ministry and Evin prison. They failed to convince him to recommend to the UN Commission on Human Rights the removal of Iran from its special procedures of public scrutiny.

With an uninterrupted history from the Shah’s regime to that of the Ayatollah, Evin prison has carved a place for itself in the world’s prison literature. Galindo Pohl’s visit to Iran would have been incomplete without a tour of the prison, where he met the infamous...

During the 1980s, the UN Special Representatives did not create a separate category for this critical human right to freedom of opinion, expression, and the press, and they revealed almost nothing on its violations. An inert period of human rights violations is one during which no overt claim to rights is made and hence no open violation is reported. After the bloody suppression of the early 1980s, all appeared quiet on the secular front of the Islamic Republic, and the regime’s secular outsiders did not appear in international reports in this category of violations, since the regime had eliminated all...

The cases that I have selected from among many ordeals experienced by intellectuals and dissident Shiite clerics best captured the intimidating climate in which they tried to assert their freedom of expression in the 1990s. Of the two secular intellectuals, one died in custody, and the other ended up in exile in Germany. The cases of Ali Akbar Sa‘idi Sirjani and Faraj Sarkuhi generated considerable publicity in the Western press, in the international human rights community, and among Iranian émigrés in the United States and Europe. Each in its own way revealed the dynamics of the human rights discourse in...

As discussed in Chapter 2, although the Islamic Constitution allowed for a republic, velayat-e faqih (the vice-regency of the Islamic Jurist) circumscribed the right to participate directly in elections for the Majlis (parliament), the presidency, and other elected positions. This contradictory constitutional arrangement bedeviled the political clerics in the 1990s.

The Guardian Council acted as the political watchdog of velayat-e faqih. It was composed of six clerical jurists who were appointed by the faqih (Supreme Leader) and six lay jurists who were nominated by the Head of the Judiciary, himself an appointee of the faqih. The Constitution bestowed upon the...

During the early 1990s, UN Special Representative Galindo Pohl took a wider look at Iranian society and saw, apparently for the first time, the secular women who since 1979 had endured insults, intimidation, and discrimination.¹ He improved his coverage of the violations of women’s rights and increasingly expanded his reports to include almost all discriminatory laws and humiliating practices directed at them. As mentioned before, international human rights reports during the 1980s devoted no section to the rights of women. Perhaps out of deference to Islamic sensitivities of the rulers, the forced hijab (Islamic dress code) was not generally perceived...

Let me return to the UN monitoring process and reporting procedures and examine not only their limitations but also their possible influence on Iranian officials who were assigned to deal with the charges of human rights violations. The results were mixed, mostly ineffective in forcing the recalcitrant state to change its practices but somewhat adequate in helping the society to arrive at a better understanding of human rights. However, the visible changes in Iran in the late 1990s and the reformers’ discussions about past violations had no real impact on Iranian diplomats who continued upholding the façade of rejections and...

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights has been a proper response to the menacing presence of modern states. Notwithstanding the intense cultural debates, a universal human rights core exists as an accepted practice, from which no derogation is permissible on grounds of national security or culture. States that stood accused of violating this core have often and predictably resorted to denial and concealment, not to justification based on cultural norms and religious imperatives. A cursory inventory of human rights violations by states that include the Islamic Republic reveals that certain violations, largely of civil and political rights, regularly occur, irrespective...

In the summer of 2009, the Islamic Republic faced an unprecedented crisis of legitimacy on display for global audiences. A few hours after the last paper ballots were cast in the presidential election of June 12, the incumbent, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, was hurriedly declared the winner in a landslide. Three days later, more than 2 million distraught people poured into Tehran’s streets, asking, “Where is my vote?” The Western media reported with awe, forced to revise the post–September 11 notion of an “axis of evil.” Few Western investigative journalists who witnessed the events noted the spontaneity of the young urbanites,...