Watchdog

The UN's special rapporteur on freedom of religion or belief, Asma Jahangir, is due to begin a weeklong trip to Turkmenistan on September 4, at the invitation of the government.

According to the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, Jahangir will visit Ashgabat, Dashoguz, and
Turkmenbashi. In addition to meeting government officials responsible for matters of religion or belief, she is also due to sit down with representatives of religious or belief communities, civil society organizations, UN agencies, and international organizations.

At the end of her trip, Jahangir is scheduled to hold a press conference to share her preliminary findings with the media and will present a report containing her conclusions and recommendations to a forthcoming session of the Human Rights Council.

Jahangir is a human rights lawyer based in Pakistan. She was appointed special rapporteur in July 2004 by the former United Nations Commission on Human Rights.

In its August 2008 survey of Turkmenistan, the Norway-based Forum 18 News Service, which monitors religious freedom worldwide, found "continuing violations by the state of freedom of thought, conscience, and belief. Unregistered religious activity continues -- in defiance of international human rights agreements -- to be attacked."

According to the U.S. State Department, the Turkmen government continues to monitor all forms of religious expression, but notes that "the government has started to review and rewrite its legislation with the stated goal of meeting international standards, including the criminal and criminal procedures codes, and laws on religion and assembly."

Iranian police and security forces have prevented families from holding an annual commemoration of the mass executions of political prisoners in 1988, in spite of pleas by Amnesty International to allow the gathering to take place. The event would have marked the 20th anniversary of nationwide executions of political prisoners, which followed a cease-fire in the eight-year Iran-Iraq war.

An individual whose brother and two other relatives were among those executed told Radio Farda on condition of anonymity that the police did not even let the families approach the Khavaran cemetery near Tehran where the victims are buried. The mourner said that plain-clothes police and special forces were among the security officers deployed to prevent the mourners from visiting the graves, and added that the families plan to return to the site to hold their commemoration on Sunday, August 31.

Families have assembled each year to remember the victims. In the past nineteen years of commemorations, many participants have been beaten or arrested, but the relatives were always allowed to mourn in Khavaran, under the surveillance of ordinary and secret police accompanied by men with clubs.

The Iranian regime has not admitted to the executions, despite reports published by Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and other international human rights groups. A publication that wrote about the mass executions, "Arya," was banned in 1999 and the writer of the article was imprisoned for over a year. in 2007, French-Iranian documentary filmmaker Mehrnoush Solouki, who had filmed the mass graves in Khavaran, was imprisoned for a month and then barred from leaving Iran for over a year. The news about the executions leaked in 1988 as a result of the publication of a letter of protest written by Ayatollah Hosseinali Montazeri, the heir apparent to Iran’s revolutionary leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, which cost Montazeri his position.

-- Mossadegh Katouzian