Iran’s contested presidential election of 2009 illustrated for many Iranians the depth of political divisions over citizens’ rights in their country.
This video series on citizens’ rights in Iran explores through interviews with experts and witnesses the ways in which Iran has protected or breached those rights since it signed the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights in 1968.
This episode looks at citizens’ rights during the presidency of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (2005-2013). Interviewees examine conditions both before and after Iran’s contested 2009 presidential election.
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Mehrangiz Kar, a lawyer and human rights activist, says that religious radicals involved in the development of Iran’s political system after 1979 considered modernity decadent but came to face a society unlike the one they had envisioned. Because some people – including those who had supported the revolution – chose a modern lifestyle, radicals sought to divide society by painting them as “dark satanic figures” influenced by monarchy and imperialism.
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Ramin Jahanbegloo, a philosopher and academic, describes how security forces arrested him at Tehran’s Mehrabad Airport in 2006 and forced him to confess that he was part of a conspiracy to overthrow Iran’s political system using “soft subversion” and a network of connections he had formed at international conferences. Jahanbegloo says he was the first person to propagate the discourse of non-violence in Iran, and that authorities arrested him because they perceived the idea of non-violent struggle as a threat.
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Ardeshir Amir Arjomand, a former adviser to Iranian opposition leader Mir Hossein Mousavi, says that by 2009 he felt that Iranian authorities had completely abandoned the rule of law, and that Iranian society was witnessing the disintegration of the modern state. That, he says, is why, with the presidential election approaching, he joined Mousavi’s campaign. Mousavi’s manifesto on human rights, he believed, reflected a developed understanding of citizens’ rights. But following the election, he says, authorities systematically violated Iranians’ right to a fair election and their right to protest afterward.
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