Iran International
UN experts and Amnesty International have expressed deep concern over Iran’s persecution of Baha’is and urged an end to pressure on religious and other minorities.
“We are deeply concerned at the increasing arbitrary arrests, and on occasions, enforced disappearances of members of the Baha’i faith and the destruction or confiscation of their properties, in what bears all the signs of a policy of systematic persecution,” the experts said in a statement Monday.
The Shia clergy consider the Baha’i faith as a heretical sect. Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei has on several occasions called the Baha'i faith a cult and in a religious fatwa in 2018 forbade contact, including business dealings, with followers of the faith.
Bahai’s, who number around 300,000 in Iran, cannot hold jobs in the public sector and are sometimes sacked from their jobs in the private sector under pressure from authorities. They are also deprived from higher education.
Followers of the Baha'i faith say the Islamic Republic has taken its systematic campaign to a higher level in the past few months. Earlier this month Security forces laid siege to a village in northern Iran and demolished houses and farms belonging to members of the persecuted faith.
Security forces have also arrested tens of Baha'is including Mahvash Sabet, Afif Naimi, and Fariba Kamalabadi, three former leaders of the community, and shut down businesses.
The intelligence ministry claimed on August 2 that the detained Baha’is were linked to the Baha’i Universal House of Justice in Haifa, Israel, and had collected information in Iran and conveyed it to their headquarters, implying that such information would be shared with Israel. The Universal House of Justice is the nine-member supreme ruling body of the Bahaʼi Faith.
Signatories of the statement including Javaid Rehman, Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in Iran, Fernand de Varennes, Special Rapporteur on Minorities Issues, Nazila Ghanea, Special Rapporteur on freedom of religion, as well as several members of the Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances added in their statementthat the acts against Baha’is formed part of a “broader policy to target any dissenting belief or religious practice, including Christian converts, Gonabadi dervishes and atheists.”
“The international community cannot remain silent while Iranian authorities use overbroad and vague national security and espionage charges to silence religious minorities or people with dissenting opinions, remove them from their homes and effectively force them into internal displacement,” the experts said.
Amnesty International launched an urgent appeal regarding the escalation of attacks on Baha’is human rights Tuesday, urging national chapters and concerned individuals to write to three Iranian officials including Chief Justice Gholamhossein Mohseni Ejeiand urge them. to “immediately and unconditionally release” all the Baha’is recently detained as well as those in prison from before and “quash all convictions and sentences imposed on this basis.”
Amnesty’s appeal said detainedBaha’is are targeted solely for the peaceful exercise of their right to freedom of religion and called on authorities to end discrimination against the community in law and in practice, including in access to employment, housing, and agricultural, industrial, trade and other activities necessary for the enjoyment of social, economic and cultural rights.
For decades Iran has not allowed visits to any of the fourteen UN human rights experts who have made requests to monitor the situation of human rights.
Fars, linked to the Revolutionary Guard, is not the only government-controlled media outlet periodically bringing up this issue, as Iran negotiates with the United States through the Europeans to restore the 2015 nuclear deal (JCPOA).
Once the deal is restored the United States will lift oil export sanctions imposed by former President Donald Trump when he withdrew from the JCPOA in 2018. It will also remove international banking restrictions also imposed as part of Trump’s ‘maximum pressure’ on Tehran.
But what Iranian media presents as ‘Europe’s freezing winter” has almost nothing to do with Tehran’s crude oil exports, except generally helping to bring down oil prices. Europe’s need to replace Russian gas is a specific issue on its own that Iran cannot help with at all.
There are two major reasons why a nuclear agreement now cannot impact Iran’s ability to export natural gas for the foreseeable future.
First is Iran’s huge domestic need that exceeds its current production capacity, and second is the absence of the infrastructure to export the gas as LNG.
Iran produces around 750 million cubic meters of gas per day, which is a considerable amount, but it has suffered from domestic shortages for the past three years as demand has risen and gas production has plateaued or decreased.
The huge domestic demand primarily comes from extraordinary low prices – a de facto fuel subsidy offered to the population more as a loft-over of the revolutionary days than any good reason. Some estimates say that Iran has sustained a loss of close to $300 billion in the past decade simply by selling gas cheap to domestic consumers. In the same manner, gasoline and electricity are extremely cheap in Iran. A gallon of gasoline is sold at the pump for around 22 US cents.
Natural gas production could have increased with exports in mind, since Iran has the second largest reserves in the world, but for close to 20 years successive government were unable to invest in boosting extraction. The reason for this was both international sanctions (2010-2015) and current US sanctions imposed since 2018. There are also US sanctions prohibiting American participation in Iran’s energy sector going back to 1996.
All these sanctions were imposed because of Iran’s nuclear program and they banned investments and critical technology that only Western energy giants could have provided for expanding production.
Even Chinese energy companies left Iran’s South Pars gas field in the Persian Gulf that can easily produce more than 10 percent of global needs.
Having fallen behind in gas production, Iran also never built LNG terminals to serve global markets, like its tiny neighbor Qatar has done. Building such terminals can take 3-5 years, even if a nuclear agreement is signed today and US sanctions are lifted. Considering the need to build larger gas platforms to boost production, the time needed for Iran to ship LNG to Europe is at least 7-8 years.
There are also political hurdles Tehran must overcome. Its most important strategic ally is Russia, which would not like Iran taking a big share of its European market. The Iranian government is talking about a “gas swap” with Moscow, which means Russia wants Iran to sell its natural gas.
If current European strategy of replacing Russian gas stays in place in the absence of a resolution to the Ukraine crisis, any gas deal with Iran would mean buying energy from Moscow.