Liberalism in Iran - Political Freedom and Dissent

Political Freedom and Dissent

In a 2008 report, the organization Human Rights Watch complained that "broadly worded `security laws`" in Iran are used to ”to arbitrarily suppress and punish individuals for peaceful political expression, association, and assembly, in breach of international human rights treaties to which Iran is party." For example, "connections to foreign institutions, persons, or sources of funding" are enough to bring criminal charges such as "undermining national security" against individuals.

Since the mid-1990s, with the empowerment of Iranian civil society and the growth of a new generation of post-revolutionary intellectuals, liberal ideas have found a new vibrant life among many academics and students. In light of these events, some observers began predicting a Velvet Revolution in Iran, led by the youth and inspired by the Western liberal values of democracy, freedom of speech and assembly, women's rights, and the right to peaceful dissent. With the rising expectations of the Iranian reform movement and 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 political freedoms. The predominantly reformist parliament drafted several bills allowing increased freedom of speech, gender equality, and the banning of torture. Despite the initial optimism, these bills were all dismissed or significantly watered down by the Guardian Council and leading conservative figures in the Iranian government at the time.

Regarding the gradual unraveling of the reformist movement, an article from The Economist magazine said,

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.

Although relatively peaceful when compared to the state-sponsored assassinations that occurred in the first decade of the Islamic republic, throughout the 1990s the theocratic regime rarely hesitated to apply violent tactics to crush its political adversaries, with demonstrators and dissidents commonly being imprisoned, beaten, tortured or murdered (“disappeared”).

The Iran student riots, July 1999 were sparked following an attack by an estimated 400 paramilitary Hezbollah vigilantes on a student dormitory in retaliation for a small, peaceful student demonstration against the closure of the reformist newspaper, Salam earlier that day." At least twenty people were hospitalized and hundreds were arrested," in the attack. Ahmad Batebi, a demonstrator in the July 1999 Iranian student riots, received a death sentence for "propaganda against the Islamic Republic System." (His sentence was later reduced to 15, and then ten years imprisonment.)