The U.S. State Department has classified Iran as a “country of particular concern” for “having engaged in or tolerated particularly severe violations of religious freedom.”
“UN report: ‘Persecution based on gender, ethnic and religious grounds intersect in Iran,’” Article 18, August 6, 2024:
A new report from the United Nations’ Fact-Finding Mission says ethnic and religious minorities were singled out in the Iran regime’s crackdown on the “Woman, Life, Freedom” movement. The advocacy paper, ‘”They have dehumanised us”: Minority rights violations during the “Woman, Life, Freedom” movement in the Islamic Republic of Iran’, published yesterday, says minority groups were “disproportionally” impacted. Having interviewed numerous victims, the Mission found “the crime against humanity of persecution on gender grounds intersected with persecution on ethnic and religious ground”. In a statement accompanying the report, the Mission stated that “ethnic and religious minorities in Iran, in particular Kurd and Baluch minorities”, were targets of a “disproportionate” crackdown. The “Woman, Life, Freedom” protests were triggered by the unlawful death in custody in September 2022 of Jina Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old Iranian-Kurdish woman, after her arrest by the so-called “morality police” for alleged non-compliance with Iran’s mandatory hijab laws. The paper documents a range of gross human-rights violations committed by security forces in Iran against members of minorities, including unlawful deaths, extrajudicial executions, unnecessary use of lethal force, arbitrary arrests, torture, rape, enforced disappearances, and gender persecution – many of which “amount to crimes against humanity”. According to the Mission, this situation is the “direct result of long-standing discrimination” that “must end immediately”….
