In its annual report 2007, House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee Human Rights condemned violation of human rights in Iran.

This report partly reads: The FCO report states that the overall human rights situation in Iran has “remained poor”. It adds that “serious human rights violations have continued”, with a “significant deterioration in some of our main areas of concern”. This includes a “rapid increase” in the rate of executions, with Iran second only to China in absolute terms. A man was stoned to death in Qazvin province for adultery in July 2007, the first confirmed report of a stoning.

The report argues that Iran continues to deny its people the right to express their opinions freely, and that there has been “an alarming clampdown on any form of organised protest
In March 2008, we published a Report into Global Security: Iran after having visited the country. We considered the human rights situation in Iran as part of this inquiry. We stated: We were seriously concerned by the way in which senior figures within the Iranian regime used their religious and ideological beliefs to justify severe abuses of human rights in their country.

In our Report, we noted the widespread discrimination faced by members of religious minority groups, in particular the Bahai.’ community. Domestic violence remains a problem in Iran, and we cited a claim by Reporters Sans Frontiers that Iran has imprisoned
more journalists than anywhere else in the Middle East. We noted that same-sex relations remained illegal in Iran (and could carry the death penalty).

In our Report, we highlighted arguments made by Human Rights Watch and others that the EU was prioritising diplomatic negotiations over Iran’s nuclear programme at the expense of pressing Tehran on human rights. The FCO rejected this charge.

We concluded that Iran’s human rights record was “shocking” and we recommended that the Government ensured “human rights are not treated as a secondary concern to the nuclear issue”. We also recommended that the Government should underline “to Iran that its poor record in responding to human rights concerns makes it more difficult for the international community to trust its intentions in other fields failure to meet basic human rights obligations, and welcomed our findings in this context.

We conclude that Iran’s human rights record remains shocking and appears to be deteriorating. We welcome the Government’s recognition that treating human rights in
Iran as an issue of secondary concern would be counter-productive. We recommend that, in its response to this Report, the Government should set out where it believes progress can realistically be made in advancing human rights in Iran and the further that the Government itself is taking to achieve such progress.