Iran

From the Iranian Workers’ Solidarity Network, http://iwsn.org.
Despite a new report by the UN’s nuclear “watchdog” agency stating that Iran is in compliance with its legal obligations to the agency under the nuclear non-proliferation treaty (NPT), the UN Security Council voted on March 3 to punish Iran with a third round of financial sanctions.
The Reuters news agency reported on February 22 that the “UN nuclear watchdog said on Friday it confronted Iran for the first time with Western intelligence reports showing work linked to making atomic bombs and that Tehran had failed to provide satisfactory answers”.
A new US intelligence report released on December 3 “not only undercut the administration’s alarming rhetoric over Iran’s nuclear ambitions but could also throttle Bush’s effort to ratchet up international sanctions and take off the table the possibility of preemptive military action before the end of his presidency”, the December 4 Washington Post reported.
“Iran has provided sufficient access to individuals and has responded in a timely manner to questions, and provided clarifications and amplifications” about its past nuclear activities that “are consistent with … information available to the agency”, Mohamed ElBaradei, director-general of the UN’s International Atomic Energy Agency, stated in a 10-page report distributed to the IAEA’s 35-member governing board on November 15.
“America’s hostile policy to the Iranian people and the country’s legal institutions are against international law. They are worthless and ineffective, and doomed to failure”, Iranian foreign ministry spokesperson Mohammad Ali Hosseini told a media conference in Tehran on October 25.
“In a setback for the United States, Iran won a two-month reprieve from new UN sanctions over its nuclear program on Friday. The Bush administration and its European allies ceded to Russian and Chinese demands to give Tehran more time to address international concerns”, Associated Press reported on September 29.
On July 26, the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC) and the International Transport Workers Federation (ITF) issued a call for their affiliates to join an international day of action on August 9 to protest the imprisonment of two trade union leaders in Iran. Mansour Osanloo, president of the Tehran bus workers’ union, Sandikaye Kargarane Sherkate Vahed, has for the third time over the past year-and-a-half found himself in detention. The latest arrest took place after he was abducted while travelling on a Tehran bus on July 10. He is being held in Evin prison, charged with “conspiring against national security”.
Labourstart.org reports that a Tehran court has given bus workers’ union leader Mansour Osanloo a five-year prison sentence after convicting him of “acting against national security” and making “propaganda against the system”. Another jailed Iranian union leader, Mahmoud Salehi, has announced that his kidney problems have worsened and his blood pressure has fallen dramatically. His life could be in danger as the authorities are doing nothing to help him. Salehi, the former president of the Bakery Workers’ Association in Saqez, was arrested at a 2004 May Day rally but released on bail after going on hunger strike. On April 9 this year he was jailed for one year, and was denied the right to take his medicine with him. To send a protest message demanding Saqez’s release, visit <http://www.labourstart.org/cgi-bin/solidarityforever/show_campaign.cgi?c=231>.
On March 25, Iran announced it would limit inspections of its nuclear activities by the UN’s International Atomic Energy Agency to its legally binding requirements under the country’s 1974 nuclear safeguards agreement with the IAEA.
The Campaign to Free Women’s Rights Defenders in Iran reported on March 12 that Shadi Sadr and Mahboubeh Abasgholizadeh were charged on March 11 with being a “threat to national security”. They are the only two women remaining in custody after the arrests of more than 30 women on March 4. Sadr, a lawyer, was arrested while defending the women activists arrested at a demonstration that day. Sadr and Abasgholizadeh have been denied access to their lawyers and have been interrogated without their lawyers being present.
On March 4, police arrested 33 women and charged them with endangering national security, propaganda against the state and taking part in an illegal gathering. The women were demonstrating outside Iran’s Tehran Revolutionary Court to demand a fair trial for five prominent women’s rights activists arrested in June 2006 during a peaceful protest.