By Meredith Lee-Clark
Impunity Watch Reporter, Middle East
TEHRAN, Iran – On August 8, a top judiciary official in Iran acknowledged that some of the protestors detained after the June 12 presidential election had been tortured. This was the first such acknowledgement by a senior government official.
Qorbanali Dori-Najabadi, Iran’s prosecutor general and the official who made the acknowledgement, said that “mistakes” were made during the interrogations, and “those who were involved should be punished.” Dori-Najabadi’s statement was made as the government held the second day of hearings for the approximately one hundred jailed protesters.
Protests broke out after Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was declared the winner of the presidential election. Many Iranians believe the election was rigged, and that those who were jailed were tortured in attempts to elicit “confessions” implicating Mir Hossein Mousavi, the leading reformist presidential candidate, and Mehdi Karroubi, another reformist candidate, for trying to incite a “velvet revolution.”
Mousavi has gained the support of many of the country’s reformist clerics, including former president Mohammad Khatami.
After the first day of hearings on August 1, Khatami questioned the legitimacy and constitutionality of the trials, and said that the court erroneously relied on “confessions taken under certain circumstances which are not valid.”
Many of the arrests and interrogations were carried out by the Revolutionary Guard and the Basij militia. In the past, the Iranian judiciary has been unable to hold members of either group accountable, and it is unclear whether it will be able to do so in this instance.
For more information, please see:
New York Times – Iranian Acknowledges Torture of Some Protesters – 8 August 2009
ABC (Australian Broacasting Corporation) – Iran Protesters Suffered “Medieval Torture” – 3 August 2009
Al-Arabiya – Iran Protesters Confessed After Torture: Mousavi – 2 August 2009
BBC News – Torture Claim Against Iran Trial – 2 August 2009
The Guardian – Jailed Iran Reformists “Tortured to Confess Foreign Plot” – 26 June 2009
