Iran is home to the earliest known charter of human rights^[1] — the Achaemenid dynasty established unprecedented principles of human rights in the 6th century BC, under the reign of Cyrus the Great. After his conquest of Babylon in 539 BC, the King issued the Cyrus Cylinder, discovered in 1879 and recognised by many today as the first document defining a person's human rights. The cylinder declared that citizens of the Persian Empire would be allowed to practice their religious beliefs freely and abolished slavery. This means that all the palaces of the Kings of Persia were built by paid workers, in an era where slaves typically did such work. These two reforms were reflected in the biblical books of Chronicles and Ezra, which state that Cyrus released the followers of Judaism from slavery and allowed them to migrate back to their land. Following Persia's defeat at the hands of Alexander the Great, the concept of human rights was abandoned. Today many Iranians, such as Hojatoleslam Ahmad Khatami, point to this early history as evidence of Iranians being "pioneers of human rights." ^[2]

In 1906, the Iranian Constitutional Revolution resulted in a constitutional monarchy. For the first time in the more than 2000 years since the reign of Cyrus the Great, Iran was relying on a code of law to govern the interactions of its citizens and define their minimum freedoms.

With the arrival of Reza Shah Pahlavi in 1925, the constitution was for all practical purposes ignored. Political prisoners were imprisoned, political opponents and erstwhile allies were executed. Torture of political prisoners was common ^[3]

His son, Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi continued in his father's footsteps, and his SAVAK were notorious for their imaginative torture methods. ^[4]

The Islamic Revolution that overthrew the Pahlavi Dynasty is thought by some to have significantly worsened human rights conditions in Iran. According to political historian Ervand Abrahamian,

"whereas less than 100 political prisoners had been executed between 1971 and 1979, more than 7900 were executed between 1981 and 1985. ... the prison system was centralized and drastically expanded ... Prison life was drastically worse under the Islamic Republic than under the Pahlavis. One who survived both writes that four months under warden Asadollah Lajevardi took the toll of four years under SAVAK. ^[5] In the prison literature of the Pahlavi era, the recurring words had been "boredom" and "monotony." In that of the Islamic Republic, they were "fear," "death," "terror," "horror," and most frequent of all "nightmare" (kabos)." ^[6]

Others (such as journalist Hooman Majd) believe fear of the government and security services was much more pervasive under the late Shah's regime, and that the Islamic Republic's intelligence services, "although sometimes as brutal as the Shahs', spend far less effort in policing free political expression", inside private spaces.^[7] Another issue is whether a decline public acceptance of government repression has limited the Islamic government's ability to repress dissent. According to Akbar Ganji, "notions of democracy and human rights have taken root among the Iranian people" making it "much more difficult for the government to commit crimes."^[8] One Iranian-American academic doing research in Iran recently notes that, "liberal notions of rights are almost hegemonic in Iran today."^[9] And Majd himself explains the Islamic Republic's relative tolerance by claiming that if Iranian intelligence services "were to arrest anyone who speaks ill of the government in private, they simply couldn't build cells fast enough to hold their prisoners." ^[10]

Following the rise of the reform movement within Iran and the election of moderate Iranian president Mohammad Khatami in 1997, numerous moves were made to modify the Iranian civil and penal codes in order to improve the human rights situation. The predominantly reformist parliament drafted several bills allowing increased freedom of speech, gender equality, and the banning of torture. These were all dismissed or significantly watered down by the Guardian Council and leading conservative figures in the Iranian government at the time.

According to The Economist magazine,

The Tehran spring of ten years ago has now given way to a bleak political winter. The new government continues to close down newspapers, silence dissenting voices and ban or censor books and websites. The peaceful demonstrations and protests of the Khatami era are no longer tolerated: in January [2007] security forces attacked striking bus drivers in Tehran and arrested hundreds of them. In March police beat hundreds of men and women who had assembled to commemorate International Women's Day.^[11]

Iran Human Rights Documentation Center

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