Iran Judiciary Report Points to Violations

In an unprecedented report, Iran’s hard-line judiciary has acknowledged widespread human rights violations in prisons, including the use of torture, state-run media reported Sunday.

The report said prison guards and officials in detention centers had ignored a legal order banning torture. It also said police had made arrests without sufficient evidence and held suspects in undeclared detention centers.

The report, details of which were broadcast on state radio and appeared on the front page of several newspapers, said investigators had discovered human rights violations such as the “blindfolding and beating” of defendants. The inspectors also found a 13-year-old boy jailed for stealing a hen, a woman imprisoned because her husband was a fugitive and a man who has been in prison since 1988 without a verdict in his case.

The report has been given to the judiciary’s head, Ayatollah Mahmoud Hashemi Shahroudi.

Abbas Ali Alizadeh, head of the Tehran Justice Administration, who drafted the report, said some detention centers run by the hard-line elite Revolutionary Guards had refused to admit inspectors or investigate whether rights were being respected.

Last year, Shahroudi ordered a ban on the use of torture for obtaining confessions, a move seen as Iran’s first public acknowledgment of the practice.

Iran’s constitution outlaws torture, but rights groups say security forces routinely use it to extract confessions.