Mr. Rajavi said: Although this report, prepared on the basis of the Special Representative short five-day pre-planned visit, refers to cases of abuses of the most basic principles of human rights, the lack of a fair trial and the suppression of religious minorities, in no way does it reflect the grave dimensions of human rights violations in Iran, especially during the past year.
The NCR President noted: During his trip to Tehran, the Special Representative did not visit any political prisoners and most of his time was devoted to meeting with senior officials of the regime. The mullahs took him on an orchestrated tour of Evin prison, similar to their routine for foreign visitors. Prior to his trip, political prisoners in Evin were transferred to other locations and the prison was painted and prepared for his arrival. The Iranian Resistance exposed the matter at the time.
Mr. Rajavi stated that before the Special Representative's trip to Iran, the Iranian Resistance's representatives had met him and his colleagues at the United Nations Human Rights Center in Geneva several times and provided more than 1,600 pages of documentation and evidence on specific cases of human rights abuses in Iran in the last year alone. Regrettably, the NCR President said, no mention is made in the report about these undeniable cases of human rights abuses.
The NCR President stressed: Last year, the situation of human rights in Iran failed to improve. The bloody crackdown of popular protests, including the April 1995 protest in south Tehran and March 1996 unrest in Bonab, northwestern Iran, the adoption of new suppressive laws by the mullahs' Majlis and the staging of scores of large and small military maneuvers in most Iranian cities dramatically escalated the atmosphere of repression throughout the country. One can say with utmost certainty that as far as violating the most basic human rights of the Iranian people are concerned, 1995 proved to be one of the worst years of the mullahs' evil reign in Iran.
Recalling the persistent suppression of women in Iran, the NCR President stressed that the clerics' inhuman treatment of Iranian women under the pretext of the Iranian society's unique culture and through taking advantage of Islam was alien to the Iranian culture and to Islam, this religion of compassion, tolerance and equality.
Mr. Rajavi noted that the report contains no replies to the 15 fundamental questions he had posed to the Special Representative in a letter before his trip to Tehran. The NCR President had asked Mr. Copithorne to question the Iranian regime's authorities about the number of massacred political prisoners in autumn 1988, torture of political prisoners, including the rape of virgin girls before their execution and the killings of pregnant women, the multitudes of mass graves, the assassination of the Resistance's activists abroad, etc.
Mr. Rajavi said: The U.N. special rapporteurs on the freedom of expression and on religious intolerance who also visited Iran, as well as international human rights organizations such as the Human Rights Watch, whose representative traveled to Tehran, and the United States Department of State's annual human rights report and the British Parliamentary Human Rights Group all underscored in no uncertain terms the persisting deterioration of the situation of human rights in Iran, particularly the denial of the freedom of expression and the suppression of religious minorities.
Referring to the report's mentioning of the assassination of Mrs. Zahra Rajabi, an NCR member, last February in Istanbul, Mr. Rajavi noted that since the start of 1995, terrorists dispatched by the Khomeini regime had murdered eight members and sympathizers of the Iranian Resistance and the Mojahedin and scores of Iranian dissidents and members of religious minorities beyond Iran's borders.
Mr. Rajavi called on the fifty-second session of the U.N. Human Rights Commission to adopt, despite the obvious shortcomings of the submitted report, a strongly-worded resolution based on the irrefutable documents on the Khomeini regime's violations of the most basic rights of the Iranian people and export of terrorism and fundamentalism beyond Iran's borders. He further urged the UNHRC to refer the issue of severe and continuing human rights abuses in Iran to the United Nations Security Council.
Secretariat of the National Council of Resistance of Iran - Paris March 29, 1996
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