Above: Baha’i victims of arson © Bahai World Centre
A hard-hitting article by Oxford University human rights lecturer Dr Nazila Ghanea about the persecution of the Baha’is in Iran has been published on the Daily Telegraph website.
According to Dr Ghanea, freedom of expression is being severely curtailed in Iran.
What connects an academic, a blogger, a Nobel prize winner, a postgraduate researcher, a cyber feminist, a journalist and a woman who let her head covering slip? The answer? They have all had their freedom to express themselves violated. They have all been imprisoned, flogged and fined in Iran.
New embargo on freedom of speech
Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights makes it clear that everyone has the right to freedom of expression, but the Iranian authorities are rapidly whittling away this freedom.
And now Iran’s Prosecutor General, Ayatollah Qorban-Ali Dorri-Najafabadi has announced a new ban on freedom of speech. He…
has declared that the very expression of affiliation to the Bahá’í faith is illegal. This was communicated in a letter to the Minister of Intelligence, Ghulam-Husayn Ejeyee, who needs no encouragement to violate rights. Human Rights Watch named him one of Iran’s ‘Ministers of Murder’ four years ago.
According to the Prosecutor General , everyone is free to have his own belief and faith. “However, no expression or declaration in order to disparage the thought of others, nor any attempt to teach them resulting in deception and agitation of minds is permitted.”
Belief cannot be separated from the expression of belief
A recent open letter by the Baha’i International Community addressed to Ayatollah Najafabadi (see this post) makes it clear that the Prosecutor General’s attempt to separate belief and the actions that follow from belief is nonsense. Najafabadi stated:
Adherence to a principle or belief is free [to anyone], but to openly express and proclaim it in order to cause deviation in the thoughts of others, to manipulate, pretend, disseminate [ideas], and otherwise attempt to deceive and confuse people will not be permissible.
The Baha’i International Community ripostes:
Such a statement tests credulity to an extreme. It is widely recognized that similar statements have been used by repressive regimes throughout the centuries to justify the arbitrary suppression of conscience and belief. The suggestion that it is possible to separate the convictions held by an individual from their expression in words and action begins an entirely false line of reasoning. To see its absurdity one need only ask oneself what it means to have faith if it is not consciously manifested in one’s relationships with others.
To put it bluntly, Iran’s Prosecutor General is talking absolute rubbish.
Dangerous stuff, this freedom of expression
Dr Ghanea points out:
What we are being told, therefore, is that the Iranian belief system is unitary and very vulnerable to the free expression of some bloggers, some morally loose women and some journalists – but not all Bahá’ís, all 300,000 of them that make up Iran’s largest non-Muslim religious minority.
Human Rights instruments depart from this perspective. How is it possible to single out one religious community and deny it any expression of its values? How can full religious freedom go hand in hand with the criminalisation of any expression or activity – personal or public – that may flow from it? UN standards recognise freedom of thought, conscience and religion as being far-reaching and profound; they encompass freedom of thought on all matters, personal conviction and the commitment to religion or belief, whether manifested individually or in community with others. The fact that the protection of religion or belief necessarily includes the protection of its expression is beyond dispute.
Iran’s freedom of conscience at risk
The Baha’is may be the particular victims of the Prosecutor General’s statements, but the reality is that he is shutting down freedom of conscience, freedom of religion or belief, and freedom of expression for all Iran’s citizens.
Read Nazila Ghanea
The inner workings of Iran’s government are not easily understood. Iran is a State Party to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, the UN instrument that embodies these essential freedoms and yet, like so many tyrannical regimes, flouts international norms while publicly claiming to be protecting their own citizens.
Dr Ghanea’s well argued analysis will help you to a clearer understanding and repays reading in detail. Go read!
Technorati Tags: Baha’i, Bahai, Iran, persecution, human rights, freedom of expression, freedom of conscience, religious freedom, Ghanea, Daily Telegraph
Related posts:
- Persecution of Baha’is – watch this video!
- Bahá’í arrests in Iran – Wendi’s excellent article
- US House of Representatives condemns the persecution of Bahá’ís in Iran
- Powerful letter from Baha’i International Community to Iran’s Prosecutor General
- Release Baha’i and Christian prisoners in Iran – EU call
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