Iranian Lawmaker Invites UN Human Rights Investigator To Debate
By GVF
An Iranian lawmaker has expressed readiness to debate Ahmad Shaheed, the United Nations’ special investigator on the situation of human rights in Iran.
Speaking to Iran’s Mehr news agency, Khalil Hayat Moghaddam, a member of the Majlis judicial commission dismissed the recent findings of Ahmad Shaheed’s damning report on the Iranian regime’s wide-ranging human right abuses, including the continued house arrest of opposition leaders Mir Hossein Mousavi and Mahdi Karroubi.
The 21-page report, sumitted in September 2011, emphasised “the need for greater transparency and cooperation from” Iranian authorities and requested that the special investigator be granted access to both detention centres and those detained in Iran to assess the allegations of human rights violations against the country’s rulers.
However, Iranian MP Khalil Hayat Moghaddam dismissed the report by saying that “the penal laws in Islam are the best and most comprehensive.” “I’d like to invite him to a debate in order to prove the lies in his claims,” the parliamentarian went on to add.
“Mr Ahmad Shaheed, the United Sates and those countries making allegations about human rights violations in Iran ought to pay a visit to the gas chambers and secret prisons in the west and the US in order to observe the violations of the most fundamental rights of human beings,” Hayat Moghaddam argued.
“However … Iran carries out sentences with compassion and mercy.”
The publication of Shaheed’s assessment of the human rights situation in the country has seen mixed reactions from Tehran.
Last week, Hossein Naghavi Hosseini, spokesperson for the Iranian Parliament’s human rights commission said that Iran was prepared to examine Ahmad Shaheed’s findings.
However, Iran’s Deputy UN Ambassador Eshagh al-Habib has slammed the report’s findings, saying the assembly’s decision to appoint a Special Rapporteur in the first place was the “result of a one-sided approach and political ambition of certain countries in particularly the United State and its Europeans allies.”
