Iranian Regime uses Systemic Sexual Violence Against Women in the Name of Islam
In his recent letter to President Bush, Ahmadinejad referred to a government’s role in respecting the human rights of its citizens; prisoners included (my assumption). As part of the argument that America has failed to uphold such rights he alluded to the prison facility at Guantanamo Bay:
There are prisoners in Guantanamo Bay that have not been tried, have no legal representation, their families cannot see them and are obviously kept in a strange land outside their own country. There is no international monitoring of their conditions and fate. No one knows whether they are prisoners, POWs, accused or criminals.
European investigators have confirmed the existence of secret prisons in Europe too. I could not correlate the abduction of a person, and him or her being kept in secret prisons, with the provisions of any judicial system. For that matter, I fail to understand how such actions correspond to the values outlined in the beginning of this letter, i.e. the teachings of Jesus Christ (PBUH), human rights and liberal values.
Apparently, he doesn’t practice what he preaches, Iran Press News / Telegraph:
A leading Iranian pro-democracy and women’s activist, who was jailed on trumped-up charges last year, has revealed how the clerical regime cynically deploys systemic sexual violence against female dissidents in the name of Islam.
Roya Tolouee, 40, was beaten up by Iranian intelligence agents and subjected to a horrific sexual assault when she refused to sign forced confessions. It was only when they threatened to burn her two children to death in front of her that she agreed to put her name to the documents.
Roya Tolouee and her son Nima
Perhaps just as shocking as the physical abuse were the chilling words of the man who led the attack. “When I asked how he could do this to me, he said that he believed in only two things - Islam and the rule of the clerics,” Miss Tolouee told The Sunday Telegraph last week in an interview in Washington after she fled Iran.
Read the rest here.