Human rights in Iran

While the monarchy under the rule of the shahs was widely attacked by most Western watchdog organizations for having an abysmal human rights record, the government of the Islamic Republic which succeeded it is considered still worse by many.

Burglars in particular were subjected to the bastinado (beating the soles of the feet), and the strappado (suspended in the air by means of a rope tied around the victims arms) to "reveal their hidden loot".

Suspected spies and assassins were "beaten, deprived of sleep, and subjected to the qapani" (the binding of arms tightly behind the back) which sometimes caused a joint to crack.

[9] The main form of pressure was solitary confinement and the withholding of "books, newspapers, visitors, food packages, and proper medical care".

[11] But after an attempted assassination of the Shah in 1949, he was able to declare martial law, imprison communists and other opponents, and restrict criticism of the royal family in the press.

[12] Following the pro-Shah coup d'état that overthrew the Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh in 1953, the Shah again cracked down on his opponents, and political freedom waned.

[13] Over 4000 political activists of the Tudeh party were arrested,[14] (including 477 in the armed forces), forty were executed, another 14 died under torture and over 200 were sentenced to life imprisonment.

[19] Guerrillas embracing "armed struggle" to overthrow the Shah, and inspired by international Third World anti-imperialist revolutionaries (Mao Zedong, Ho Chi Minh, and Che Guevara), were quite active in the first half of the 1970s[20][Note 1] when hundreds of them died in clashes with government forces and dozens of Iranians were executed.

[26] By 1976, this repression was softened considerably thanks to publicity and scrutiny by "numerous international organizations and foreign newspapers" as well as the newly elected President of the United States, Jimmy Carter.

[30] The deaths of the popular and influential modernist Islamist leader Ali Shariati and the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini's son Mostafa, in 1977, were believed to be assassinations perpetrated by SAVAK by many Iranians.

[36] According to the historian Abbas Amanat:[37] The clerical activists, backed by the Qom marja's, capitalized on the Jaleh Square massacre to paint the regime as brutal and illegitimate.

Aided by a rumor-mongering machine that became fully operational in the absence of reliable media and news reporting, the number of casualties, the “martyrs” on the path of Islam, was inflated to thousands, and the troops who opened fire on them were labeled as Israeli mercenaries who were brought in to crush the revolution.Post-revolutionary accounting by Emadeddin Baghi, of the government Foundation of Martyrs and Veterans Affairs, found 88 people killed on Black Friday: 64 (including two females) in Jaleh Square, and 24 (including one woman) in other parts of the capital.

Consequently, the constitution combined conventional liberal democratic mandates for an elected president and legislature,[45] and civil and political rights for its citizens, with theocratic elements Khomeini desired.

The constitution vested sovereignty in God, mandated non-elected governing bodies/authorities to supervise the elected ones,[45][46] and subordinated the civil/political rights[47] to the laws/precepts/principles of Islam,[48] Some of the ways that basics of law in Iran clashed with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights after 1979 included: The vast majority of killings of political prisoners occurred in the first decade of the Islamic Republic, after which violent repression lessened.

Human rights groups estimated the number of casualties suffered by protesters and prisoners of the Islamic government to be several thousand.

Between January 1980 and June 1981 another 900 executions (at least) took place,[94] for everything from drug and sexual offenses to "corruption on earth", from plotting counter-revolution and spying for Israel to membership in opposition groups.

The predominantly reformist parliament drafted several bills allowing increased freedom of speech, gender equality, and the banning of torture.

The peaceful demonstrations and protests of the Khatami era are no longer tolerated: in January 2007 security forces attacked striking bus drivers in Tehran and arrested hundreds of them.

[113] In September 2022 a new round of "nationwide" protest began that has "spread across social classes, universities, the streets [and] schools", and been called "the biggest threat" to the government of Iran since its founding with the Islamic Revolution.

[114] The unrest began with the Death of Mahsa Amini at the hands of Iranian morality Islamic police, after she was detained for allegedly wearing hijab incorrectly.

"[125] Explanations for why this is include the importance of "debate and discussion" among clerics in Shiite Islam that has spilled over into the Iranian public (journalist Elaine Sciolino),[126] and that "notions of democracy and human rights" now have much deeper roots among Iranians than under the Shah (Akbar Ganji, Arzoo Osanloo, Hooman Majd),[127] in fact are "almost hegemonic" (Arzoo Osanloo),[128] so that it is much harder to spread fear among them, even to the point that if Iranian intelligence services "were to arrest anyone who speaks ill of the government in private, they simply couldn't build cells fast enough to hold their prisoners" (journalist Hooman Majd).