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Tuesday, 24 May 2005 |
 U.S. Newswire: On May 18, Human Rights Watch (HRW) released a report; "No exit: human rights violations in People's Mojahedin Organization's camps", accusing an Iranian opposition group, Mojahedin e-Khalq (MEK), of mistreatment of its members. This unprecedented report raises serious questions for the public, thus, Association of Iranian-Americans in New York (AIA) will hold a press conference at 1 UN Plaza Hotel on Wednesday, May 25, at 11 a.m. to Noon to discuss the validity of Human Right Watch's report. |
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Tuesday, 24 May 2005 |
 AFP: The main Iranian opposition group, in exile and based in France, on Tuesday condemned the European Union for its so-called "betrayal" for negotiating with Tehran on its controversial nuclear program. "Negotiating with the mullahs' regime constitutes a betrayal," Mohammed Mohaddessin, an official in the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI), told a news conference, accusing Tehran of massive human rights violations. |
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Tuesday, 24 May 2005 |
 Iran Focus: London, May 24 – More than a dozen British parliamentarians today called on the government to support
the Iranian opposition, while denouncing a recent report by U.S.-based Human Rights Watch on the most active Iranian opposition group, the People’s Mojahedin of Iran (PMOI),
during a conference in the House of Commons. |
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Monday, 23 May 2005 |
 AFP: The United States said Monday it was "deeply troubled" by the disqualification of reformist presidential candidates in Iran, and vowed to stand by the Iranian people in fighting for democracy. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice led a strong attack on Tehran after the its hardline clergy barred more than 1,000 would-be contenders from the June 17 poll, leaving the field open to a handful of conservatives.
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Monday, 23 May 2005 |
 Iran Focus: Tehran, May 23 – Hundreds of students demonstrated in and around Tehran University this evening, setting tyres alight and protesting what they said was “an upcoming sham presidential election”. Chants of “down with dictatorship”, “down with tyranny”, and “referendum, referendum, this is what the people demand” could be heard
all around the university campus. |
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Monday, 23 May 2005 |
 Iran Focus: Washington, May 23 - Colorado's Iranian-American Society will tomorrow hold a press conference on the implications of a recent report issued by New York-based Human Rights Watch on the Iranian opposition group People's Mujahedeen of Iran (MEK). The conference scheduled to take place at 11:00 a.m. in downtown Denver is expected to criticise HRW for the 28-page document which the Society says is “based on a series of lies from the Iranian Information Ministry agents”. |
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Monday, 23 May 2005 |
 AFP: Senior deputies in Iran's conservative-controlled parliament have called for a review of diplomatic and commercial ties with Canada amid a continuing dispute over the murder here of Iranian-Canadian photographer Zahra Kazemi, a report said Monday. A statement from the Majlis National Security and Foreign Policy Committee said that in response to Ottawa's decision to "constrain" relations with ... |
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Monday, 23 May 2005 |
 AFP: Iran must meet basic "commitments" -- including an international ban on nuclear weapons development and transparency in its upcoming presidential election, before it can be admitted to the World Trade Organization, White House spokesman Scott McClellan said Monday. McClellan said the White House in March gave its support to a European offer to help Iran gain admittance to the WTO, in exchange for assurances it would abandon its nuclear efforts. |
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Monday, 23 May 2005 |
 Los Angeles Times: Iran's hard-line Guardian Council disqualified more than 1,000 presidential hopefuls on Sunday, narrowing a diverse field of candidates for next month's
election to just six conservative contenders.
The surprise announcement all but guarantees that a conservative will take over the presidency from moderate Mohammad Khatami, whose attempts at reform have been stifled in the increasingly rigid political climate of recent years.
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Monday, 23 May 2005 |
 AFP: Iran's interior ministry, which is still controlled by reformists, said Monday that presidential election would go ahead as scheduled on June 17 even though powerful hardliners have disqualified the main pro-reform candidate. "We are bound by the law to organise the election on the given date," interior ministry spokesman Jahanbakhsh Khanjani told AFP. |
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Monday, 23 May 2005 |
 Los Angeles Times: A crowd of about 500 people gathered in Huntington Beach on Sunday to demand that the United States support the Iranian opposition and remove its most powerful armed group, the People's Mujahedin, from the government's list of terrorist organizations. |
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Monday, 23 May 2005 |
 Globe and Mail: Iran told Canada to back off yesterday over the case of Montreal photojournalist Zahra Kazemi, who died in Iranian custody, criticizing the Canadian government's
"immaturity" and warning it to stop interfering in the case.
Spokesmen for both Iran's foreign ministry and its judiciary took shots at Canada over the weekend, and indicated that Ms. Kazemi's Canadian citizenship was irrelevant to them. |
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Monday, 23 May 2005 |
 AP: All reformists who registered to run in next month's presidential elections were rejected by Iran's hard-line constitutional watchdog, which approved only six out of the 1,010 hopefuls, state-run television reported. The announcement Sunday prompted a crisis meeting by
reformers, who immediately threatened to boycott the election.
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Sunday, 22 May 2005 |
 Iran Focus: London, May 22 – A human rights organisation with worldwide reach has said the latest report by U.S.-based Human Rights Watch on the Iranian opposition as based on “fabrications”. The United Kingdom branch of Jubilee Campaign issued a response to a 28-page document ... |
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Sunday, 22 May 2005 |
 Iran Focus: London, May 22 – A Conservative MP attacked a U.S.-based rights group for publishing a report on the Iranian opposition “on the basis of interviews with Iranian intelligence agents”. David Amess, MP released a statement saying, “I recently learned of a dire report published by Human Rights Watch (HRW) on the People's Mojahedin Organisation of Iran (PMOI). The fabricated stories of 'former members' of the PMOI interviewed by HRW contained nothing new and are stories that have been told by the same individuals for many years to whomever will listen”. |
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Sunday, 22 May 2005 |
 Iran Focus: London, May 22 - A prominent Human Rights lawyer in the United Kingdom levelled serious accusations against U.S.-based Human Rights Watch for a report published on the Iranian opposition People’s Mojahedin, calling the paper “baseless and unsubstantiated”. Malcolm Fowler, a member of the International Human Rights Committee and Law Reform Board of the Law Society of England and Wales, said in a letter addressed to Human Rights Watch, “The content of the ... |
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Saturday, 21 May 2005 |
 Iran Focus: London, May 21 – A top British human rights lawyer today cast strong doubt on the validity of a report by U.S.-based Human Rights Watch on the Iranian opposition People’s Mojahedin. In a television interview on the sidelines of a legal conference in the Human Rights and Social Justice Research Institute of the London Metropolitan University, Imran Khan said, “What concerns me is the methodology of those who have compiled this report”. |
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Saturday, 21 May 2005 |
 Iran Focus: Stockholm, May 21 - Thousands of Iranians from across Sweden today took part in a demonstration in the capital Swedish capital to denounce the “appeasement” of Iran by Western governments. Organisers said that the rally’s aim was to condemn the inclusion of the main Iranian opposition group, the People’s Mojahedin, in the list of terrorist organisations. |
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Saturday, 21 May 2005 |
 Iran Focus: Tehran, May 21 – Dozens of workers from Zob Rekord Foundry in Mashad (provincial capital of Iran’s north-eastern province of Khorrasan Razavi) gathered outside the provincial headquarters of the Department of Labour, protesting overdue wages. |
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Saturday, 21 May 2005 |
 Globe and Mail: A doctor who treated Montreal photojournalist Zahra Kazemi in the intensive care unit of a Tehran hospital has reportedly been arrested by Iranian Revolutionary Guards. The doctor's life may be in jeopardy because he can testify about the severity of the head wounds and other injuries the photojournalist suffered while she was in the custody of Iranian authorities, Stephan Hachemi, Ms. Kazemi's son, said yesterday. |
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Friday, 20 May 2005 |
 Iran Focus: Washington, D.C., May 20 – A report by the New York-based Human Rights Watch on an Iranian opposition group was “factually erroneous, politically motivated, and the result of an investigative process so flawed as to call into serious question the honesty and integrity of those who issued it”, the group’s counsel in the United States said. Ronald G. Precup, U.S. Counsel for the People's Mojahedin of Iran (PMOI) said, “The cited sources for the report are all operatives of Iran's Ministry of Intelligence and Security, experts in planting false information about the PMOI around the world". |
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Friday, 20 May 2005 |
 Reuters: Iran's Islamic system has been abused to deny the president real power, sapping public interest in next month's election, the country's top dissident cleric says. Grand Ayatollah Hossein Ali Montazeri, an architect of the Islamic revolution,
told Reuters Iranians would not vote in large numbers on June 17 because real authority lay not with the president but with Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. |
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Thursday, 19 May 2005 |
 Iran Focus: London, May 20 – A British parliamentary group expressed its profound concern at the publication of a report by Human Rights Watch “containing unsubstantiated allegations against the Iranian Resistance and the People’s Mojahedin Organisation of Iran (PMOI)” and called on the rights group to retract the report, which it said “does not stand to scrutiny”. |
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Thursday, 19 May 2005 |
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AP: As political change takes hold in several Middle Eastern countries, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said Thursday that Iran's leaders "should not consider themselves immune" from such developments. The United States and other nations have complaints about Iran's government that go beyond the current international effort to stop Tehran from developing a nuclear weapon, Rice said. |
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Thursday, 19 May 2005 |
 London, May 19 – A recent report by Human Rights Watch against the main Iranian opposition group would not stand to scrutiny in a court of law, according to a London-based legal expert. Masoud Zabeti, President of the Committee of Anglo-Iranian Lawyers, which has organised a number of seminars
of parliamentarians and jurists in the past, told Iran Focus that much of the HRW report was a copycat of statements by agents of the Iranian Ministry of Intelligence and Security (MOIS) that appear daily on Irandidban, an internet website run by the MOIS. |
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Thursday, 19 May 2005 |
 AP: A senior State Department official ruled out on Thursday the possibility of providing Iran with fresh economic incentives as a means of curbing its nuclear ambitions.
"There is no reason to believe that extra incentives offered by the United States at this point would make a real difference,'' Undersecretary of State Nicholas Burns said. |
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Thursday, 19 May 2005 |
 AFP: An exiled Iranian opposition group Thursday denied charges by a leading human rights organisation that it had tortured dissident members and said the allegations were politically inspired. The People's Mujahedeen Organisation said in a statement in Paris that the report by the US-based group Human Rights Watch was nothing more than "a highly
politicised invective against the Iranian resistance movement." |
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Thursday, 19 May 2005 |
 Iran Focus: Brussels, May 19 - A parliamentary caucus in the European Parliament rejected today a report by the New York-based Human Rights Watch on alleged human rights abuses in an Iranian opposition camp in Iraq and called on the organization to retract the controversial report. |
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Thursday, 19 May 2005 |
 U.S.Newswire: In a press release, Human Rights Watch announced that it has released a 28-page report titled, "No Exit: Human Rights Abuses Inside the MKO Camps." The report contains telephone interviews with 12 "former...(Mujahedin e-Khalq Organization-MEK)) members." It considers their statements as "credible claims that they were subjected to imprisonment as well as physical and psychological abuses." |
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Thursday, 19 May 2005 |
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Iran Focus: Paris, May 19 – Iran’s main opposition group, the Mujahedeen-e Khalq (MeK) rejected a report released by New York-based Human Rights Watch on alleged human rights abuses in MeK camps in Iraq as “a rehash of trite accusations” by agents of Iran’s secret police, the Ministry of Intelligence and Security. |
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