Media In Iran Discuss Tehran's Choices As Biden Tours Region

The chief prosecutor of Iran’s Khorasan Razavi province, Mohammad-Hossein Doroudi, said on Thursday that the verdicts for cutting off fingers and hands of several convicts are going through the legal formalities to be carried out. 

"The judiciary does not show mercy to those who break the norms of the society and disrupt the public order,” he added, noting that judges issue sentences for hand amputation and even execution in theft cases based on the constitution and the sharia law (Islamic law) regardless of foreign calls against such sentences. 

Late in June, the head of the Iranian association of surgeons, Iraj Fazel, called on the judiciary not to sanction the amputation of fingers to punish thieves.

In a letter to the chief justice Gholam-Hossein Mohseni-Ejei, Fazel called the practice "worrying and horrifying" and said it would create “a wave of hatred and disgust in the world” against the Islamic Republic.

Earlier in June, four fingers of a prisoner were cut off in Tehran’s Evin prison with a guillotine reportedly installed at the infirmary a month earlier to carry out such sentences.

According to Islamic Sharia law, punishment for theft can be amputation of fingers or hands. 

Eight men convicted of theft are at imminent risk of having their fingers cut off, according to the Abdorrahman Boroumand Center for Human Rights in Iran (ABC) and Amnesty International.

Following the announcement of Nouri’s sentencing Thursday, foreign ministry's new spokesperson Naser Kanani in a statement “strongly condemned” the Swedish court’s “politically-motivated and unacceptable” verdict against Nouri, saying the Stockholm government would be responsible for the damage the verdict would cause in bilateral relations.

Kanani accused Sweden of giving into pressure by an Albania-based opposition group, Mujahedin-e Khalq Organization (MEK), that Tehran considers a terrorist organization. Most of the approximately 5,000 prisoners summarily executed in prisons were members of MEK serving their sentences.

On the eve of the court ruling, Iran repeated calls for Nouri’s release, saying his detention is driven by “false allegations” made by the MEK.

Iran’s Foreign Minister, Hossein Amir Abdollahian, met with Majid Nouri, Hamid Nouri’s son, on Wednesday. In the meeting he said he had held a telephone call with Swedish Foreign Minister Anne Linde and called for Nouri’s immediate release.

Kanani accused the Swedish court that Nouri’s “most basic human rights” have been denied during his 30 months incarceration. “The treatment of Nouri and the limitations imposed on him is clear proof a violation of human rights by those who claim [to defend] human rights,” the statement said.

The accusations coming from one of the world’s most criticized human rights abusers would hardly find any attentive ears.

Iranian activists, opponents of the Islamic Republic and human rights defenders showed their immense satisfaction on social media over the verdict, expressing hope that the main leaders who approved and organized the killings would one day face independent courts.

Nouri, now 61, was charged with “war crimes, crimes against humanity, torture, and participating in the continued crime of refusing to return the bodies of executed prisoners to their families.” He has denied any wrongdoing and said plaintiffs' allegations were a "completely imaginary story".

In April Swedish prosecutors who invoked the principle of "universal jurisdiction" for serious crimes to bring the case to trial submitted their final indictment life imprisonment for Nouri.

Nouri, a former deputy prosecutor at Gohardasht Prison near Tehran at the time of the killings, is the first person ever put on trial for the executions carried out based on a fatwa by Iran's then-supreme leader, Ruhollah Khomeini, against the MEK which carried out a wave of bombings in Iran and struck an alliance with Saddam Hussein during the 1980-88 war. “Showing mercy to those who take up arms against the Islamic government is being naïve,” Khomeini said in his fatwa.

Most of victims were linked to the MEK but there were also some with links to leftist and secular groups such as Fadaiyan Khalq Organization (FKO) and Tudeh Party as well as some Kurdish groups such as Komala and Kurdish Democratic Party of Iran.

The exact number of prisoners executed during the purging of prisoners in 1988 is not known but according to Amnesty International, the Iranian authorities "forcibly disappeared" and "extrajudicially executed" around 5,000 between July and September 1988.

There are allegations that Iran seeks to exchange Nouri with Swedish-Iranian scientist and academic Ahmad-Reza Djalali arrested on vague charges of espionage and collaboration with Israel in 2016 and sentenced to death in 2017.

The declaration, with the text signed by Israeli Minister Yair Lapid and United States President Joe Biden released Thursday, expressed “unshakeable US commitment” to Israel’s “military edge.” Washington pledged further “defense assistance” on top of the $38 billion 10-year Memorandum of Understanding in 2016 under President Barack Obama and the $1-billion assistance after the 2021 Israeli-Palestinian violence centered on Gaza.

The document – dubbed the ‘Jerusalem Declaration’ – singled out as integral “to this pledge…the commitment never to allow Iran to acquire a nuclear weapon.” The US was, it said, “prepared to use all elements of its national power to ensure that outcome.”

While US officials have previously spoken vaguely of means to preclude an Iranian weapon, this is apparently the first time such a commitment has been made openly with Israel, which is widely believed to have carried out attacks on Iranian nuclear sites, which are monitored by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), and killed its scientists.

Lapid reportedly told Biden that the time had come to end diplomatic efforts to revive the 2015 Iran nuclear deal, from which Trump withdrew the US and which Biden had an election commitment to revive.Lapid argued instead for a “credible military threat.”

Aside from the nuclear issue, Biden committed the US “together with other partners to confront Iran’s aggression and destabilizing activities, whether advanced directly or through proxies and terrorist organizations such as Hezbollah, Hamas, and Palestinian Islamic Jihad.”

‘Robust regional architecture’

While the declaration noted Biden’s “longstanding and consistent support of a two-state solution” allowing a Palestinian state in Israeli-occupied territories, it pledged to work against “all efforts to boycott or de-legitimize Israel” and “to firmly reject the BDS campaign.” Calls for boycotting and disinvestment from Israeli entities active in the occupied West Bank have gathered momentum since rights groups including Amnesty International concluded that Israeli military rule amounted to a form of apartheid where Jewish settlers had political and civil rights denied to Muslims and Christians.

The Biden-Lapid declaration anticipated Biden’s arrival in Saudi Arabia Friday as part of a process of “building a robust regional architecture.” It hailed Israel’s 2020 ‘normalization’ agreements with Bahrain, Morocco, and the United Arab Emirates as important “to the cause of regional security, prosperity and peace” and hailed March’s Negev summit in Israel – attended by the foreign ministers of of Bahrain, Egypt, Israel, Morocco and the United States – as “efforts to build a new regional framework that is changing the face of the Middle East.”

Officials and hardliner media in Tehran have already condemned the emergence of an Israeli Arab alliance, telling the United States that no regional arrangement “can save the Zionist regime”.

Nour News, close to Iran’s supreme national security council on Thursday threatened that Tehran can use “new methods” for “punishing” Israel, and energy shipments could be endangered in the region. This was a little-veiled threat to shipping in the Persian Gulf and possibly in the Red Sea, where Iran’s Houthi allies have attacked vessels in the past.

Iranian government media simply carried the news of the US-Israeli declaration, as a first reaction Thursday afternoon, but further official and semi-official reaction will follow in coming days.

The 2022 report, which was released 13 July, benchmarks the current state and evolution of gender parity across four major dimensions of Economic Participation and Opportunity, Educational Attainment, Health and Survival, and Political Empowerment as well as in several other categories. Now in its 16th year, the report analyzed the evolution of gender-based gaps in 146 countries, providing a basis for robust cross-country analysis. 

On average Iran finished 143rd in the list but in economic participation, Iran sits at the 144th place; in political empowerment, the Islamic Republic is the 142nd country; in health and survival, Iran ranks 118th; and in educational attainment on the 106th spot. 

Iranian women held a nationwide civil disobedience protest on Tuesday (July 12) against the Islamic Republic’s forced dress code, while the government has recently increased harassment of women for their insufficient hijab and many have been detained by special police patrols. This has led to more tension amid economic hardship for 90 percent of the population on fixed income, while inflation has reached 55 percent and food prices have risen by more than 80 percent, according to May-June official reports. (https://www.lranintl.com/en/202207120933)

In another report published by the Economist intelligence unit -- the research and analysis division of The Economist -- on June 23, Tehran stands at the 163rd place of the list of 173 cities in Global Liveability Index, which quantifies challenges to an individual's lifestyle in cities worldwide.

Souri Babai Chegini, a civil activist who published a video removing her hijab, was arrested Wednesday evening, July 13, in Qazvin, probably the first activist detained following the anti-hijab protests. 

According to her husband, Mohammad-Reza Morad-Behrouzi, eight agents, including two women, raided his brother-in-law's house and arrested the activist. The security forces seized her children's cellphones as well as hers and threatened her 13-year-old daughter.

Melika Qaragozlu, another woman who took off her headscarf on Tuesday and shared a video on Social media, was arrested Thursday morning.

In her video on the anti-hijab day, Chegini also criticized various other discriminations against women, including their share in inheritance compared to men, the right to custody of children and divorce, the right to travel to other countries without the consent of a male guardian, as well as Muslim men’s right for formal marriage with four women and their right to infinite number of concubines (in Shiite sect). 

Following a call by women’s rights activists for civil disobedience with the hashtag of ‘No2Hijab’ social media exploded with dozens of videos and photos of women unveiling in public.

For the past few weeks, the government has increased harassment of women for their insufficient hijab and many have been detained by special police patrols.