Iran regime responds to labor protests with lashings, fines
Monday, 30 May 2016//National Council of Resistance of Iran/NCRI
NCRI Labor Committee calls for condemnation of mullahs’ anti-labor policies and support for Iranian workers
The Labor Committee of the National Council of Resistance of Iran calls on all international human rights organizations, labor rights institutes, syndicates, labor unions and the International Labor Organization to condemn the oppressive and criminal approach adopted by the mullahs’ regime against deprived Iranian workers who protested being fired from work and their unemployment. The Iranian regime responded to these protests by lashing, imprisoning and issuing fines against these protesters. The NCRI Labor Committee is calling for solidarity and supporting Iranian workers to see their most basic rights materialized.
The Iranian regime’s judiciary officials condemned 17 deprived workers of the Aq Dareh gold mine to 30 to 100 lashes and 5 million rial fines (around $170) for protesting their expulsion from work. The lashings were carried out in public. In flagrant collaboration with the Revolutionary Guards that has taken control of the Aq Dareh gold mine for years now, a farce court in the city of Takkab (West Azerbaijan Province in northwestern Iran) issued these rulings on the bogus charges of “preventing people from seeking employment by causing furor,” “insulting the company guard,” “destroying clothes and illegally detaining the guard” and “deliberately destroying the company billboard.”
The Aq Dareh gold mine is a national asset belonging to the Iranian people which the IRGC, like many other natural resources in Iran, has taken complete control over. Back in January 2015 the IRGC-associated “Puyan Zarkan Company” fired 350 miners under the pretext of their “contracts expiring.” On December 27, 2014, three workers committed suicide in the mine vicinity for losing their jobs, and due to the hard burden of trying to make ends meet and the intolerable poverty they were living in.
The inhumane mullahs’ regime has to this day responded to workers’ rightfully staged protests with arrests, imprisonment and lashings. At a time when dozens of factories are closing each day in cities across the country and hundreds of workers are being added to the growing “army of the unemployed,” the religious fascism ruling Iran has intensified its pressures on the workers in an attempt to quell the expansion of their protests. Labor strikes and demonstrations in Iran are being oppressed harsher than ever before.
The NCRI Labor Committee emphasizes that workers’ rights in Iran will only be materialized through the overthrow of the mullahs’ regime and the establishment of democracy and freedom in Iran. The NCRI Labor Committee calls on all the Iranian people, especially the youths, to protest the increasing cruelty that is devastating the lives of Iran’s already suffering workers and their families.
Labor Committee
National Council of Resistance of Iran
May 28, 2016
Iran regime carries out two public executions
Monday, 30 May 2016/National Council of Resistance of Iran/NCRI – Iran’s fundamentalist regime has publicly hanged two men in Fars Province, southern Iran, and Mazandaran Province, northern Iran, in the past 24 hours.On Monday, May 30, an unnamed 40-year-old prisoner, was hanged in public in the town of Noor in Mazandaran, according to the state-run Young Journalists Club (YJC) news agency which quoted the regime’s prosecutor in Noor, Qanbar Qanbari.
On Sunday, May 29, a man identified only by his surname Zohrabi, was hanged in public in the town of Kovar, 40 kilometers south of Shiraz, the provincial capital in Fars.
The mullahs’ regime last Thursday publicly hanged a man, identified only as Hamid B., in the southern city of Shiraz.
The latest hangings bring to at least 118 the number of people executed in Iran since April 10. Three of those executed were women and two are believed to have been juvenile offenders.
Ms. Farideh Karimi, a member of the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI) and a human rights activist, last week called for an urgent response by the United Nations and foreign governments to the recent spate of executions and the appalling state of human rights in Iran.
Iran’s fundamentalist regime earlier this month amputated the fingers of a man in his thirties in Mashhad, the latest in a line of draconian punishments handed down and carried out in recent weeks.
The National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI) said in a statement on April 13 that the increasing trend of executions “aimed at intensifying the climate of terror to rein in expanding protests by various strata of the society, especially at a time of visits by high-ranking European officials, demonstrates that the claim of moderation is nothing but an illusion for this medieval regime.”
Amnesty International in its April 6 annual Death Penalty report covering the 2015 period wrote: “Iran put at least 977 people to death in 2015, compared to at least 743 the year before.”
“Iran alone accounted for 82% of all executions recorded” in the Middle East and North Africa, the human rights group said.
There have been more than 2,300 executions during Hassan Rouhani’s tenure as President. The United Nations Special Rapporteur on the human rights situation in Iran in March announced that the number of executions in Iran in 2015 was greater than any year in the last 25 years. Rouhani has explicitly endorsed the executions as examples of “God’s commandments” and “laws of the parliament that belong to the people.
