The original content of Democracy Now! Headlines appears under the Creative
Commons BY-NC-ND 3.0 License (United States). For more, including their other
shows and media, visit www.democracynow.org.
October 20, 2011

U.N. Probe Accuses Iran of Escalating Abuses 
---------------------------------------------



A United Nations probe is accusing Iran of increasing human rights
abuses, including extra-judicial killings and torture. In a report to
the U.N. General Assembly, Ahmed Shaheed, the U.N. Special Rapporteur on
Human Rights in Iran, said hundreds of prisoners have been secretly
killed and many more held without trial.

Ahmed Shaheed: "I was also concerned by reports of multifarious and
systemic deficits in the administrations of justice including certain
practices that amount to torture, cruel or degrading treatment
detainees, the imposition of the death penalty in the absence of proper
judicial safeguards, the denial of reasonable access to legal council
and adequate medical treatment, the existence of widespread use of both
secret and public executions, the employment of capital punishment in
juvenile cases and the application of capital punishment in cases that
do not hold up to the level of serious crimes by international
standards,
such as narcotics cases."

The Iranian government has dismissed the report and in an apparent
response, says it has launched it's own probe of human rights abuses
committed by the United States.



.