Iran Must Stop Executions Of Protesters, Says UN Fact-Finding Mission
A fact-finding mission mandated by the UN urged Iran on Wednesday to stop executing people sentenced to death for anti-government protests that rocked the country last year.
A fact-finding mission mandated by the UN urged Iran on Wednesday to stop executing people sentenced to death for anti-government protests that rocked the country last year.
The death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini in September 2022 while in the custody of the country's morality police unleashed a wave of mass protests across Iran, marking the biggest challenge to the Islamic regime in decades.
Since then, several people have been hanged for participating in the unrest, and other detainees still face the danger of capital punishment.
"We call on the Iranian authorities to stop the executions of individuals convicted and sentenced to death in connection with the protests and reiterate our requests to make available to us the judicial files, evidence, and judgments regarding each of these persons," Sara Hossain, chair of the Iran Fact-Finding Mission, told the Human Rights Council in Geneva.
The mission also called for the "release all those detained for exercising their legitimate right to peaceful assembly and for reporting on the protests".
Responding to the statement in comments to the Council, Kazem Gharib Abadi, secretary general of Iran's High Council for Human Rights, called the establishment of the fact-finding mission last year "an entirely politically motivated and unacceptable move". He then walked out of the session in protest.
The Iranian representative in the session complained about the use of the word "regime" for the Islamic Republic in several occasions until the chair of the session said he no longer allows such interruptions.
In May, Iran executed three men it said were implicated in the deaths of three members of its security forces during the demonstrations.
With reporting by Reuters
Mohsen Ardakani, the head of Tehran's water and sewage management, said plans would begin in the coming months but did not elaborate on the mechanism of trade or how the wastewater will be distributed to buyers and consumers.
Dozens of developed countries treat almost all domestic sewage and deliver the treated water to agricultural and industrial sectors. However, the nominal capacity of Iran’s sewage treatment plants is only 5.8 million cubic meters per day, which means that if all of them work at full capacity all year long, they are only able to turn 2.1 billion cubic meters of sewage into treated wastewater, which is less than a quarter of the country’s household water consumption. This means most of the clean water consumed is not treated to be recycled.
Moreover, a quarter of drinking water in the domestic sector is wasted through the distribution and transmission process due to the country's worn-out network. However, according to Ardakani, there are 35 laboratories in Tehran that test water, claiming the distributed water is on par with national and global standards.
All these factors on the backdrop of a drought and low precipitation in the country have led to a severe water crisis in Iran, with regular water cuts and rationing in several cities as well as the capital.
Rainfall in Tehran has decreased by five percent compared to the previous year, and currently the volume of water reserves in dams is down by 40 percent compared to last Iranian year (ended on March 19).
Earlier this week, Mehdi Zare, Professor of the International Research Institute of Seismology, said within the past 25 years almost 25 million Iranians have been displaced amid water scarcity worries. “There are about 12 million marginalized people in Iran, and almost 10 million of this population are directly facing problems caused by the water crisis,” he added.
Water issues have been the main topic of President Ebrahim Raisi’s visits to Iranian provinces in recent months, taking him to Sistan-Baluchestan, Kerman and Khuzestan provinces that have very little clean water and temperature as high as 51 degrees (about 124 in Fahrenheit).
Iranian Energy Minister Ali-Akbar Mehrabian, who was accompanying Raisi in his trip to the central province of Kerman, said last week that at least 10,000 villages in Iran are without drinking water, with about 670 people in Kerman province facing “serious” water scarcity.
Last month, the water was also out in the capital Tehran for several days with tankers distributing water to residents.
In January, CEO of Iran Water and Wastewater Company, Atabak Jafari, issued a warning saying that 270 cities and towns are suffering from acute water shortage as water levels at dams have dropped to critically low levels.
As drought persists across Iran, more underground water is exploited for irrigation, depleting natural reservoirs formed during thousands of years. Old and unregulated irrigation methods, as well as an aging urban water distribution infrastructure compound the shortage.
An inefficient agricultural sector, overgrazing of rangelands and forests, aggressive over-extraction of groundwater resources, and the regime’s mismanagement are among the main causes of water bankruptcy in Iran.
In recent years, massive protests have occurred in several cities against government mismanagement of water resources, harmful dam building, and politically motivated diversion of rivers that have devastated agriculture and drinking water sources in many areas.
In July 2021, water protests erupted in several cities in the oil-rich Khuzestan province that ended with the forceful intervention of police and the Revolutionary Guards. More than ten people were killed and hundreds detained during the protests that lasted a week.
In November of the same year, thousands protested in Esfahan over lack of water for agriculture where the iconic Zayandeh-Roud river has turned into a dry bed over the past few years. The protests soon turned into anti-government unrest.
Head of Esfahan’s crisis management headquarters said Monday that trees along the Zayandeh-Roud river – which starts in the Zagros Mountains are withering out of season.
In his third trip to the Islamic Republic this year, Igor Levitin, who is also Russia’s State Council Secretary, met with Ali-Akbar Ahmadian, the new SNSC secretary, as well as Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian.
During the meeting, Ahmadian stressed the need to speed up the implementation of bilateral agreement, including the project to complete the North-South Transport Corridor and memorandums of understanding (MoUs) in the field of oil and gas.
Russia last year pledged to invest tens of billions of dollars in joint energy projects, but similar deals were made in the past without any progress in implementation.
“Expanding relations with neighbors is a strategic policy and the main agenda of the Islamic Republic,” Ahmadian said.
According to the readout of the meeting in Iranian media, they also talked about the agreement on the construction of the Rasht-Astara railway, a strategic transport corridor that connects the existing railways of the two countries and Azerbaijan.
During his meeting with Amir-Abdollahian, Vladimir Putin’s aide also congratulated the Islamic Republic on its full membership in the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, announced earlier in the day.
