LONDON: London-based rights group Amnesty International has announced the launch of a Persian-language website in response to “an all-out assault on human rights” in Iran.
The new site, launched Friday to coincide with Human Rights Day, features the group’s “research and statements on Iran, particularly over recent years,” according to a press release.
It will include legal analysis of reports of “shocking human rights violations” by Tehran, and will “collect, preserve and analyze evidence of the most serious crimes under international law committed in Iran to facilitate future criminal proceedings,” Amnesty said.
Deputy Regional Director for the Middle East and North Africa at Amnesty International, Diana Eltahawy, said in the release: “The website arrives as Iran suffers from a deepening human rights crisis, with hundreds of individuals on death row following unfair trials — including those arrested as children — and thousands persecuted or arbitrarily detained for peacefully exercising their human rights. Meanwhile, the families of thousands of people killed or forcibly disappeared by the authorities are left waiting for truth and justice.”
Eltahawy continued: “Human rights defenders and dissidents who do speak out against repression and injustice endure grave human rights violations while the Iranian authorities have rained down bullets on protesters who take to the streets, inflicting deaths and serious injuries. Our new Persian-language website will serve as a torchlight that illuminates and exposes these crimes.”
In Friday’s announcement, Amnesty also said it would continue to report on human rights violations and discrimination suffered by Persian-majority Iran’s ethnic minorities.
“Reports on human rights violations and entrenched discrimination suffered by Iran’s ethnic minorities, including Ahwazi Arabs, Azerbaijani Turks and Kurds” will continue to be translated into Arabic, Turkish or Kurdish, the group said.
Eltahaway said the launch of a Persian language website “signifies Amnesty International’s ongoing commitment to support the people of Iran in their courageous struggle against repression and discrimination, while bolstering calls for truth, justice and reparations for the countless victims of arbitrary detention, discrimination, enforced disappearance, torture and other ill-treatment, extrajudicial executions or other unlawful killings.”
Founded in 1961, Amnesty International has become one of the world’s most prominent human rights advocacy organizations.
A statement by the group said: “Only when the last unjustly detained man, woman or child has been freed, when the last torture chamber has been closed, when the death penalty has been abolished everywhere and the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights is a reality for the world’s people, will our work be done.”
