UN Experts Slam Iran's New Family Law As Violation Of Human Rights

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Mohammad Jafar Mahallati, Iran’s former ambassador to the UN, is complicit in crimes against humanity by using his position as an Iranian diplomat to cover up the 1988 executions of 5,000 dissidents in Iran. Yet that record did not prevent him from securing his PhD in Islamic Studies from McGill University in 2006 and his professorship in religion at Oberlin College in 2007. McGill should revoke his PhD. Oberlin should dismiss him.

An exhaustive 2018 Amnesty International report titled “Blood-Soaked Secrets: Why Iran’s 1988 Prison Massacres Are Ongoing Crimes against Humanity” describes Mallahati as a senior official who helped Iranian leaders actively deny “the extrajudicial executions both in their media interviews and in their exchanges with the UN” in order to insulate the perpetrators from accountability.

Yet the executions were known to the US media and the global public. The New York Times reported in 1988 that Reynaldo Galindo Pohl, the UN’s special rapporteur on human rights in Iran at the time, “accused Iran of serious human rights violations, including a wave of political executions last summer when Iraq got the upper hand in the war in the Persian Gulf.”

There was overwhelming evidence already in 1988 that Iranian leaders had committed unspeakable crimes in Iran’s vast penal system. When the UN released documents and passed a resolution in 1988 asserting that Iran’s regime carried out mass executions, Mahallati dismissed them as “propaganda,” “fake information,” and “unjust.”

Lawdan Bazargan, the sister of a victim of the 1988 executions, told us: “While Mahallati was enjoying a high-ranking position in an oppressive Islamic regime, my brother was behind bars fighting for human rights and human dignity. Why does a liberal art school such as Oberlin College, which must be the beacon of hope, protect the perpetrators instead of the victims?”

In October 2020, Bazargan and the prominent Canadian-Iranian attorney Kaveh Shahrooz, who lost his uncle in the 1988 bloodletting, tweeted: “In fact, we know that Mr. Mahallati was aware of the killings. Because he is quoted about them in UN reports. But he is quoted as denying and downplaying them. He effectively misled the international community so the killings could continue.”

Mahallati is complicit in other human rights abuses as well. In April, new disclosures by the student paper Oberlin Review show that Mahallati helped lay the ideological foundation for the violent persecution of the Bahai community in Iran. While at the UN in 1983, as the Iranian representative assigned to the UN Commission on Human Rights, Mahallati chargedthe Bahais with terrorism and denied the extrajudicial murders that Tehran committed against them. He also lashed out at the Bahais as “sexual abusers.” Mahallati has not shown a scintilla of regret over his language dehumanizing the Bahai community.

UN and US government reports have long documented the Islamic Republic’s arrests and forced exclusion of Bahais from public life. As far back as 1983, the regime executed 22 Bahais merely for practicing their faith. To this day, the Islamic Republic refuses to recognize the Bahai faith as a religion and tyrannizes its adherents.

McGill’s academic training of Mahallati should not be surprising, as the university has long received donations from Iran. The Alavi Foundation, a regime controlled “charitable” organization in New York, has funded numerous academic and cultural activities in the United States and Canada.

In 2009, US federal prosecutors disclosed that the Iranian government controls the foundation. It began to donate funds to McGill as early as 1987, said Christopher P. Manfredi, provost and vice-principal at the university, in 2013. McGill’s Institute of Islamic Studies took in $270,000 between 2004 and 2010 from the Alavi Foundation. The university was the largest recipient of cash from the foundation in Canada. In 2014, the U.S. government seized a 36-story building in New York owned largely by the foundation, accusing the foundation of hiding its ties to the Iranian government in violation of U.S law.

Mallahati is but one example of former Iranian officials complicit in crimes against humanity who have found employment in Western academia. The regime’s former ambassador to Germany, Seyed Hossein Mousavian, teaches at Princeton University. On Mousavian’s watch as ambassador, the Iranian regime assassinated Iranian-Kurdish dissidents at the Mykonos restaurant in Berlin in 1992.

Mahallati, who sports the moniker “professor of peace” at Oberlin, has blood on his hands. It is time that both Oberlin College and McGill University take action.

Alireza Nader is a senior fellow focusing on Iran and US policy in the Middle East at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), where Benjamin Weinthal is a research fellow. Follow them on Twitter @AlirezaNader and @BenWeinthal. FDD is a Washington, DC-based, nonpartisan research institute focusing on national security and foreign policy.

The opinions expressed by the authors do not necessarily reflect the views of Iran International.

Lawmaker Hassan Norouzi told the parliamentary news service Monday he had not made remarks attributed to him Sunday by Didban-e Iran website over the 2019 protests when hunreds were killed by security forces.

Norouzi said a “fake reporter” had called him and asked about the ‘Iran Atrocities Tribunal’ held in London last week. But Didban-e Iran defended its report, insisting it had taped the conversation and might sue the deputy.

Norouzi allegedly told the website: "I was one of those who shot people. [Yes,] we killed people… They had set fire to banks and we killed them. Who is going to put us on trial for it?" He then allegedly said was "joking" and hung up.

The comments, as reported, drew swift condemnation. The conservative newspaper Jomhouri Eslami wrote that “such a joke” was “deplorable by anyone, but even more by you who are a cleric wearing the cloak of the Prophet of Mercy [Muhammad].” The newspaper argued that Islamic values required those setting fire to banks to face justice and a proportionate punishment rather than being killed before a crime was proved.

Human rights lawyer Ali Mojtahedzadeh, in a commentary published by Didban-e Iran Monday, noted that Norouzi was a member of the parliament's Legal and Judiciary Committee, making his statements "even more deplorable.”

"What kind of a joke can this be when according to official figures nearly 300 people died in this incident, many more were wounded or detained, and so many lives were ruined?" Mojtahedzadeh asked. He criticized parliament and judiciary for not carrying out "a minimum level of investigation" after two years. "Which legal system in the world doesn't charge even one person for the murder of at least 300 citizens in the streets in broad daylight?” he asked.

Iran has not officially announced figures for deaths or arrests, nor put anyone on trial for killing protesters, but has prosecuted and passed heavy sentences including the death penalty on protesters on charges including “assembly and collusion against the regime.” Officials have put the number at over 200. Independent reports have put the number of protesters killed between 300-1,500.

Mojtahedzadeh claimed Iran had laws forbidding security forces shooting suspects above the waist in any situations and that shooting anyone, even if they were setting fire to banks, needed strong justification: "The real tragedy is that not only justice, based on Sharia and the law, has not been served in the case of these events but also some truths are being distorted and even mocked."

A video posted on social media by ‘mothers of victims’ challenged Norouzi to “stop hiding in your lair with 30 bodyguards” and to “come out and face us.”

The ‘Iran Atrocities Tribunal’ claimed in a Tweet Saturday that Iran’s deputy foreign minister Ali Bagheri-Kani had threatened to “stop part” of Iran’s discussions with world powers if London did not stop the tribunal meeting. The tweet claimed the tribunal, which purports to be quasi-judicial investigation into the November 2019 protests, learnt this from “European sources.”

Didban-e Iran's report Saturday also claimed its “informed sources” had said the foreign ministry had protested to the British government for allowing the tribunal be held in the UK.

Nosrat Beheshti, who is also a civic and labor activist along with 13 other women activists published a letter in August 2019 calling on Khamenei to step down. Most were detained later, and some sentenced to long prison terms. Prior to that, 14 men had also issued a letter making the same demand, most of whom were later detained.

The Intelligence Ministry arrested Beheshti in July this year and she has remained in detention. A "Revolutionary Court" in Mashhad issued her sentence.

Prosecutors accused her of “Propaganda against the regime” and “Activities against national security”. She has also been accused of “Marxist propaganda in classrooms” while she retired eight years ago.

While Khamenei in the past has insisted that citizens can criticize him, the slightest remark can land journalists or ordinary people in jail. Typical charges include propaganda against the regime or insulting the Supreme Leader.

Robert Heinsch, an associate professor of international law at Leiden University, told the tribunal, set up by non-governmental organizations that the number of people killed in the 2019 protests in Iran following a hike in gasoline prices was probably higher than the 304 reported by Amnesty International. Heinsch said using witness testimonies, he and his associates have concluded that the brutal and lethal crackdown could not have occurred without intent and was "crime against humanity".

Crimes against humanity, developed primarily through customary international law, relate to systematic or widespread attacks. Prosecutions have included the Nuremberg trials of the Nazi leaders, the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, and the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda – all of which dealt with mass killings.

In the Saturday session of the tribunal, activist Fatemeh Khoshrou alleged that security agents who used "the most obscene insults against her” when arresting her, had “filled her mouth and nose with pepper spray for insulting the supreme leader."

Khoshrou also claimed she had been sexually assaulted and threatened with rape at a detention center belonging to the Revolutionary Guards in Khorramabad, western Iran, to force her to confess “to taking money from foreign powers.”

‘Witness 173,’ introduced as ‘Soheil Abdi,’ told the tribunal that he had been shot at close range by a “security agent” in Shahriyar, a small town south of Tehran. Abdi denied he was carrying a weapon, "not even a stone,” and said he was merely recording on his smartphone.

Abdi presented as evidence a video of himself being shot, which he said proved he was no threat to the police or others. "I wasn't there to create insecurity, I was there to protest,” he said, insisting he had been shot “before any places were set on fire or damaged.”

Another witness, introduced as ‘Witness 28,’ said she lost his brother during the protests. She claimed security forces had told her family that state television wanted to interview them and describe her brother as a martyr of the Islamic Republic. "We said our brother is a martyr, but he is a martyr for his homeland, a martyr for Iran, not a martyr of the regime."

When asked by the panel why the family refused the "martyr" status, Witness 28 said the Martyrs Foundation only served its own interests and that even those who were martyred during the Iran-Iraq War (1980-1988) had sacrificed their lives for their countrymen, not the Islamic Republic.

Panel member Hamid Sabi clarified to the tribunal that martyr in Iran means someone who has died for Islam which is why many families of the November 2019 victims have refused to accept their deceased family members to be designated as martyrs.

‘Witness 5’ told that a 19-year-old who died at home had not dared to go to hospital for treatment. "His friends were too scared to take him to hospital,” Witness 5 said. The witness added that Revolutionary Guards and Basij militia, and not protestors, had set fire to gasoline stations in order to blame protesters and justify acting against them.

Ratcliffe went on hunger strike to pressure the government to pursue the release of his wife Nazanin Zagheri-Ratcliffe who was arrested in Tehran when she visited her family in April 2016. She was sentenced to five years imprisonment without a fair trial. After completing her sentence, she was charges with new crimes and refused permission to return to Britain.

Ratcliffe went on a 15-day hunger strike in 2019, which possibly led to the couple’s daughter returning from Iran, where she was staying with grandparents.

The last days of his hunger strike coincided with the visit of Iran’s deputy foreign minister Ali Bagher-Kani to the Foreign Office to discuss Iran’s nuclear talks.

Following the diplomatic meeting, Ratcliffe met British minister for the Middle East James Cleverly on Thursday but came out of the meeting disappointed.

"If I'm honest, quite a depressing meeting," Ratcliffe told reporters after he left the Foreign Office, adding that Cleverly told him the meeting with Bagheri-Kani had been cordial.

Ratcliffe will stay in hospital for medical checks and released.