Iranians Protest Choice of Delegate
Journalists and activists say sending a hard-line prosecutor to a U.N. Human Rights Council meeting signals Tehran's views about the issue.

By Kasra Naji
June 23, 2006
Los Angeles Times
Original Source: http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-rights23jun23,1,2848242.story?coll=la-headlines-world


TEHRAN — Journalists and human rights activists in Iran joined their counterparts abroad Thursday in condemning the inclusion of a hard-line prosecutor on the country's delegation to the first session of the U.N. Human Rights Council.

This is an insult to the Iranian people, and questions the credibility of the new panel, said Issa Saharkhiz, a leading member of the Assn. for the Freedom of the Press. 

The New York-based Human Rights Watch called Thursday for the removal of prosecutor Saeed Mortazavi from the Iranian delegation in Geneva, saying he had been implicated in illegally detaining and torturing numerous former prisoners.

Iranian journalists say Mortazavi has been responsible for the closure of dozens of newspapers in the last few years, often without valid legal excuse or observance of Iranian laws governing the press.

Some of the Web loggers, or bloggers, arrested in Iran last year also implicated Mortazavi in their incarceration.

Mortazavi has largely ignored the controversy, declaring that his aim is to help prevent the West and other world powers from using the issue of human rights to attack his government. 

Developments in Palestine, the atrocities in American jails in Guantanamo, Kosovo and Bagram in Afghanistan, as well as extensive use of torture in Abu Ghraib in Iraq by U.S. forces, must be brought to the special attention of the council, he said recently.

At the council meeting Thursday in Geneva, it was not Mortazavi but Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki who spoke on these issues on behalf of Iran.

One may wonder whether the United Nations' human rights machinery and its protection system … have fulfilled their task or displayed even the slightest interest in some cases in addressing effectively these real, gross and systematic human rights violations, Mottaki told the council, in remarks quoted by the Associated Press.

He urged the council to redefine its role to prevent the imposition of a single culture on the entire world.

Mortazavi is best known for his role in the case of Iranian Canadian photojournalist Zahra Kazemi, who died of blows to the head while in custody in Iran's notorious Evin prison in 2003. She had been arrested for photographing a group of protesters outside the prison.

Nobel Peace laureate Shirin Ebadi, an attorney who represented Kazemi's family, criticized the decision to include Mortazavi in the delegation.

Maybe we should regard people like Mr. Mortazavi as representatives of the Islamic Republic of Iran's attitude toward human rights, she said, recounting what she said were numerous violations of law by Mortazavi.

An investigation of Kazemi's death by the Iranian parliament, then dominated by reformists, found that Mortazavi had lied in announcing that the cause of death was a stroke and in falsely accusing Kazemi of spying for foreign intelligence agencies.

The parliament also condemned Mortazavi for failing to respond to questions and refusing to appear before the body to discuss the case.

The judiciary had accused an Intelligence Ministry official of involvement in Kazemi's unintentional homicide, but an Iranian court later cleared the agent, who had long claimed he was being made a scapegoat.

The case, which is still open, led to a near-rupture in relations between Iran and Canada, and ties remain frosty.

Canadian Foreign Minister Peter MacKay said in a statement Wednesday that Mortazavi's presence at the U.N. meeting demonstrated Iran's complete contempt for internationally recognized principles of human rights. 

Payam Akhavan, a former U.N. war crimes prosecutor at The Hague and now a law professor at McGill University in Montreal, said that because Canada did not initiate a criminal investigation of Mortazavi in the Kazemi case, the Iranian official was able to travel freely and with diplomatic immunity. 

I think that we have to treat these people not as dignitaries but as accused criminals, Akhavan said Thursday in a telephone interview from Montreal. 

Justice Minister Jamal Karimi-Rad is leading the Iranian delegation to the international human rights panel. He has called on the council to implement Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's human rights doctrine, which he said stipulated equal justice for all nations without discrimination. Karimi-Rad said human rights must not become a tool of pressure against other countries. 

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Times staff writer Maggie Farley at the United Nations contributed to this report.