Iran refuses to let in UN's human rights monitor

Iran has announced that it will not permit the UN special rapporteur assigned with investigating its record of human rights to enter the country.

Ahmad Shaheed, the former Maldivian foreign affairs minister, was appointed by the UN in June to look into human rights violations in Iran, leading to much criticism from the regime in Tehran.

According to the Tehran Times, the state English-language newspaper, Mohammad Javad Larijani, Iran's secretary general of the high council for human rights, said: "The western-engineered appointment of a special rapporteur for Iran is an illegal measure."

Larijani – whose brothers Ali and Sadegh Larijani are Iran's speaker of the parliament and head of the judiciary – added: "This unilateral action makes no sense and if they want to send a special rapporteur to Iran, they should take the same measure in the case of other countries."

Shaheed's appointment was the result of concerted warnings by various human rights organisations against Iran's current record of human rights.

According to the organisations that have been monitoring Iran, in the first six months of this year an average of almost two people a day were executed.

Dozens of journalists, several lawyers, political activists, members of different ethnic minorities and many political figures remain in jail with poor legal representation and little access to the outside world.

In his remarks about Shaheed, Larijani objected that the countries behind the appointment of the special rapporteur had remained silent over the human rights issues surrounding "Guantánamo Bay, Abu Ghraib, and Israeli jails".

"Iran has no problem with the individual who has been appointed as the special rapporteur, but the appointment of a rapporteur on the human rights situation in Iran is unacceptable and Iran will not accept the decision," he added.

In a separate incident, Iran claimed on Monday that its revolutionary guards had dismantled an Iranian Kurdish opposition group based in Iraq after an operation inside Iraq's autonomous Kurdistan region in the past two days that left many dead on both sides.