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GENEVA (9 March 2020) Individuals detained in Iranian detention facilities are suffering from serious human rights violations and the situation of those arrested during the November 2019 protests is a subject of particular concern, said a UN expert in his latest report presented to the Human Rights Council.

Javaid Rehman, UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Islamic Republic of Iran, also highlighted that significant economic challenges in the country, worsened by sanctions, are having a significant impact on economic and social rights.

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I am concerned that the effect of sanctions has resulted in serious shortages of medication and medical equipment, including for rare and life-threatening conditions, Rehman said. I urge the countries imposing sanctions and the international community as a whole to take all measures to mitigate the negative impact of sanctions on human rights, especially the right to health.

The UN expert also stressed his concern that the Iranian Governments long-standing violations of the rights to freedom of expression, assembly and association persist. Making specific reference to the Iranian authorities unprecedented lethal response to nationwide protests in November 2019, he reiterated his call for an independent and impartial investigation of the events and for perpetrators to be held accountable.

During these protests, authorities used excessive force against individuals protesting fuel price rises and economic hardship, including aiming live ammunition at the head and organs. At least 300 people were killed, including over 20 children, a horrific violation of the right to life that I condemn in the strongest terms, he said.

Concerns about detained protesters relate to Rehmans findings on detention conditions and related fair trial rights. Detention conditions are below international standards set out in the Nelson Mandela Rules, while due process guarantees are also often violated. The Special Rapporteur is also alarmed at the prevalence of forced confessions due to torture, denial of medical treatment and other ill-treatment.

While using confessions extracted through torture as evidence is prohibited under Iranian law, in practice forced confessions are frequently used as the sole basis for convictions, the expert said.

Overcrowding, poor nutrition and a lack of hygiene are also serious concerns. These issues indicate a high risk to prisoners health from malnutrition and disease. Recent reports indicate that the COVID-19 virus has spread inside Iranian prisons.

Rehman expressed particular concern that some individuals detained during protests are reportedly being tortured to extract confessions, and that some have received harsh sentences, including the death penalty.

Other issues highlighted in his report include the arbitrary detention of womens rights advocates, human rights defenders, lawyers, cultural workers and dual and foreign nationals; discrimination against minorities; and the continued execution of child offenders despite its strict prohibition under international human rights law.

The UN expert noted progress in certain areas, such as the new nationality law that allows Iranian mothers to pass on their citizenship to their children in most cases. Rehman also welcomed the Governments increased engagement with international human rights mechanisms, including participation in the November 2019 universal periodic review and cooperation with the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights.

Javaid Rehman was appointed as Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Islamic Republic of Iran by the UN Human Rights Council in July 2018. He is a Professor of International Human Rights Law and Muslim Constitutionalism at Brunel University, London. Mr Rehman teaches human rights law and Islamic law and continues to publish extensively in the subjects of international human rights law, Islamic law and constitutional practices of Muslim majority States.

The Special Rapporteurs are part of what is known as the Special Procedures of the Human Rights Council. Special Procedures, the largest body of independent experts in the UN Human Rights system, is the general name of the Councils independent fact-finding and monitoring mechanisms that address either specific country situations or thematic issues in all parts of the world. Special Procedures experts work on a voluntary basis; they are not UN staff and do not receive a salary for their work. They are independent from any government or organization and serve in their individual capacity.

UN Human Rights, Country Page Iran

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Iran: UN expert alarmed by detention conditions in the wake of recent protests - YubaNet

KOTA KINABALU: Sabah's travel restrictions have been extended to Iran and Italy with immediate effect from Tuesday (March 10), in view of the worsening Covid-19 outbreak.

Sabah state secretary Datuk Safar Untong said nationals from these two countries would not be allowed to enter Sabah via air, sea or land.

Foreigners, regardless of nationalities, and Malaysians who are non-residents of Sabah with recent travel history to Iran and Italy within the last 14 days would not be allowed in as well.

He said any Sabahan, permanent resident or resident of Sabah under work pass, student pass, long-term social visit pass or any exemption order, returning from Iran and Italy would be subjected to a compulsory 14-day home quarantine.

Safar said all Iranian and Italians who were still in Sabah would be advised to depart or return before expiry of their visa.

"If they wish to extend their expiring visa, they might only be allowed a one-time visa extension to a maximum of seven days," he said.

Prior to these, all flights to and from China and from Korea had been banned to control the spread of Covid-19.

In Sabah, a total of 124 people have been tested for Covid-19 but all have turned out to be negative as of March 10.

From these, 92 are Malaysians (seven in Sabah), 26 China nationals, and one each from Jordan, Myanmar, Bangladesh, Korea, Hong Kong and Indonesia.

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Sabah bans travellers from Iran and Italy - The Star Online

WASHINGTON A Minnesota woman who worked as a translator for the military in Iraq was charged on Wednesday with providing highly classified information to an Iran-backed militia group. Prosecutors said she intensified her espionage as tensions between the United States and Iran increased in recent months.

Prosecutors said the contractor, Mariam Taha Thompson, 61, revealed to a Lebanese man with ties to Hezbollah the names of foreign informants and details of the information they provided to the United States. The identities of such informants are among the governments most closely held secrets, and law enforcement officials said Ms. Thompson endangered the lives of the sources as well as those of military personnel.

The officials suggested that the potential loss of classified information was grave and that the prosecution was one of the most serious recent counterintelligence cases they had seen. Several top national security prosecutors as well as the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, Timothy Shea, appeared in court on Wednesday as Ms. Thompson made an initial appearance before a judge, demonstrating the importance of the case.

If true, this conduct is a disgrace, especially for someone serving as a contractor with the United States military, John C. Demers, the assistant attorney general for national security, said in a statement. This betrayal of country and colleagues will be punished.

The recruitment of a military contractor with access to such important secrets shows the strength of the intelligence operations of Iran and its proxy forces. American officials have long warned that Tehrans intelligence work should not be underestimated.

In interviews with the F.B.I., Ms. Thompson admitted to investigators that she illegally shared classified information with the Lebanese official, according to court papers. Ms. Thompson appeared in court dressed in a red cardigan, her gray-streaked hair in a bun, but was not shackled. The judge ordered her held until a detention hearing on March 11.

She faces three charges of violating espionage laws. Under the statute, she could face up to life in prison and possibly the death penalty if the information she revealed led to the death of any of the informants.

Ms. Thompson was living in Erbil, Iraq, working on contract as a linguist. As tensions between the United States and Iran increased in the final days of December, investigators discovered, Ms. Thompsons activity on classified systems did as well. For the next six weeks, she accessed secret government files that contained the true names and photographs of American intelligence sources and government cables that outlined the information they provided to their handlers.

Ms. Thompsons purported espionage was discovered Dec. 30, days after American airstrikes on Hezbollahs Iraqi arm and shortly before the killing of Maj. Gen. Qassim Suleimani of Iran in a Jan. 3 drone attack that was a serious escalation of President Trumps growing confrontation with Iran.

The suspected leaks of classified information came at a critical time when Iranian proxy forces, like Hezbollah in Lebanon, were looking for ways to retaliate for the killing of General Suleimani, the architect of nearly every significant operation by Iranian intelligence and military forces over the past two decades.

Investigators searched Ms. Thompsons living quarters on Feb. 19 and discovered a handwritten note under her mattress listing the names of informants. The note, written in Arabic, also included a warning to a military target affiliated with Hezbollah whom prosecutors did not name and a request for the informants phones to be monitored.

Ms. Thompson told investigators that she provided classified information by memorizing it, writing it down, then showing the note to the Lebanese man when they spoke by video chat on her mobile phone.

The man took a screenshot of their video chat that showed her displaying a handwritten note with the name of two informants, court papers showed. Investigators also found pictures of the Lebanese Hezbollah leader, Hassan Nasrallah, on the mans phone.

The disclosures by Ms. Thompson did not affect the timing of the drone strike on General Suleimani, suggesting that he was not the target that she provided information about to the man. According to government documents, Ms. Thompson had a romantic interest in the Lebanese man with whom she shared the classified secrets.

The mans nephew worked for the Lebanese governments interior ministry, according to court documents released Wednesday. While the current minister of the interior is not a member of Hezbollah, he has good relations with the group. Hezbollah is part of the Lebanese government, and the United States considers it a terrorist organization.

The American military has taken steps to protect the informants whose identities Ms. Thompson revealed, according to a government official. It was unclear why their identifying information was accessible to her, raising questions about whether the military took adequate steps to protect the sources who risked their lives to work for the United States.

Former law enforcement and intelligence officials expressed surprise at the ease with which Ms. Thompson managed to gather details about informants, noting that the F.B.I. and C.I.A. make such information about their own sources extremely difficult to access.

Prosecutors did not disclose the relative importance of the informants, but even low-level sources are critical to the United States in understanding the activities and plans of Iranian proxy groups. If Ms. Thompsons disclosures compromised that network, it could complicate the militarys ability to protect its forces and stop attacks.

The Pentagon pledged to cooperate with the Justice Department during its investigation, said a spokeswoman, Alyssa Farah. She said military officials were taking all necessary precautions, including the protection of U.S. forces.

The charges against Ms. Thompson were the latest in a string of espionage cases as the government doubled down on its counterintelligence focus, seeking to stop the flow of American secrets overseas.

A little over a year ago, the government charged a former Air Force counterintelligence agent, Monica Elfriede Witt, with sharing secrets with the government of Iran, including the names of agents run by military intelligence whose covers were blown and the identities of her former co-workers.

Ms. Witt defected to Iran and remains beyond the reach of law enforcement officials.

But the government has brought to trial a number of other former intelligence officers, some of whom were charged with spying for China.

In November, Jerry Chun Shing Lee, a former C.I.A. officer, was sentenced to 19 years in prison for conspiring to deliver classified information to China. His disclosures occurred around the time that the C.I.A.s informant network in China was collapsing, though prosecutors did not accuse him of involvement in the destruction of the spy network.

In May, another former C.I.A. officer, Kevin Patrick Mallory, was sentenced to 20 years after he was charged with spying for China. Mr. Mallory was accused of providing Beijing the names of sources who had helped the American government.

A third China case involved a contractor for the Defense Intelligence Agency, Ron Rockwell Hansen, who was sentenced in September to 10 years in prison.

Eric Schmitt contributed reporting.

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Translator Accused of Revealing U.S. Secrets Amid Tensions With Iran - The New York Times

Iran reported the first deaths in Qum two days before the parliamentary elections. The trust in the government was low after its brutal suppression of the protests in November and its cover-up of the accidental shooting-down of a Ukrainian jetliner in the aftermath of Gen. Qassim Suleimanis assassination.

A high turnout in the elections would help improve the legitimacy of the government. Tehran seems to have suppressed information about the coronavirus because it did not want participation in the elections to be affected.

Although the hard-liners won the elections, voting was the lowest since 1979. The supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, accused the countrys enemies of exaggerating the threat of the coronavirus right before the elections to keep voters away from the polls.

Iran could have minimized the outbreak by moving swiftly to quarantine Qum, which is very crowded and heavily infected, but it did not. Some measures have now been taken. For instance, subway cars in Tehran have been disinfected, schools across the country are closed and Friday Prayer services are canceled in most provinces.

The authorities must immediately get relatives of all the infected and the deceased tested. They must put out truthful, transparent numbers and make assessments based on those numbers, enhance protections for health care workers and target the most affected areas. Qum must be quarantined.

Western countries in collaboration with the World Health Organization and other international institutions must take the lead on global medical diplomacy and do more to provide testing kits to Iran. The United States must overcome its belligerent posture toward Iran, provide the medical and technical support that could save lives and ease the difficulties American and European companies face in supplying medicines and medical equipment to Iran.

The most important lesson of the coronavirus crisis in Iran is that health policy must never be politicized, especially in terms of emergency medical response.

Kamiar Alaei and Arash Alaei are Iranian health-policy experts and the co-presidents of the Institute for International Health and Education in Albany, N.Y.

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How Iran Completely and Utterly Botched Its Response to the Coronavirus - The New York Times

WASHINGTON Iran has the highest reported number of deaths from the coronavirus outside China, raising questions about how the government is handling the public health crisis and whether the often secretive regime has been fully transparent about the extent of the outbreak.

Iran's health ministry spokesman said on Friday that 34 Iranians have died out of a total of 388 positive cases. Iran has now suspended parliament indefinitely due to the outbreak.

Four doctors in Iran who are familiar with how authorities are handling the outbreak, including two who work at hospitals where infected patients have been treated, told an NBC News reporter in New York that the total number of those infected is likely substantially higher than the number released by health authorities.

Dr. Mike Ryan, executive director of the World Health Organizations emergencies program, told reporters Thursday that the virus "came unseen and undetected into Iran, so the extent of infection may be broader than what we may be seeing."

U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo told Congress Friday that the U.S. had offered to help Iran respond to the virus.

Apart from China, where it was first detected in December, Iran has recorded the most deaths from the new form of coronavirus. There have been 2,747 deaths in China, out of a total of at least 78,497 confirmed cases.

But Iran's reported mortality rate now just nine under percent surpasses the rate for other countries by a wide margin. Earlier this week, it was 16 percent. China's reported mortality rate is currently at 3.5 percent. In South Korea, 13 patients have died out of 1,766 cases, for a reported mortality rate of slightly less than 1 percent. A U.S. soldier is among those infected in South Korea.

A top official in Iran, Masoumeh Ebtekar, the highest ranking woman in Irans government and a vice president for women and family affairs, has tested positive for the corona virus, state media reported, the latest senior official to contract the COVID-19 illness. Ebtekar, the English-speaking spokesperson for the group of Iranian students who seized hostages at the U.S. embassy in Tehran in 1979, was captured in a photo attending a meeting with Iranian President Hassan Rouhani on Wednesday.

Two members of Irans parliament have contracted the virus as well as the deputy health minister, who was seen wiping his brow and looking feverish at a press conference a day before he announced he had tested positive.

While the government has imposed some restrictions on holy sites and called off some Friday prayer services, President Rouhani has said there are no plans to quarantine entire cities hit by the virus.

Amid a shortage of surgical masks and hand sanitizer in shops, public health experts say Iran could become the hub of a major outbreak across the Middle East, especially given its porous borders with unstable countries at war or in turmoil.

Iranian officials reported the first case of virus in the religious city of Qom last week, and coronavirus has spread to at least seven other provinces. Other countries in the region, including Iraq, Kuwait, Oman and Afghanistan, reported their first cases this week and said the patients had recently visited Iran.

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In an echo of public reaction in China, critics of the Iranian regime in and outside the country are questioning whether officials in Tehran have given the public a full and accurate picture of the outbreak. But Iranian officials have rejected any suggestion that they are playing down the epidemic.

Full coverage of the coronavirus outbreak

The head of Medical Science University in Qom, Mohammad Reza Ghadir, said on state television that the Health Ministry had banned releasing figures on the outbreak in the city.

Asked how many people had been placed in quarantine, Ghadir said, "The Health Ministry has told us not to announce any new statistics."

Ghadir also said that "most of the tests have to be done in Tehran, and Tehran announces it." His comments suggested that diagnostic tests were mainly being conducted in the capital.

Outside medical experts said reporting on the total number of cases of infection in Iran was possibly lagging behind reporting on deaths. That could be because Iranian authorities are missing less severe cases across the country because of how they are testing and diagnosing patients, because of how information is shared or because of flawed medical equipment.

"This appears to be a reporting issue," said Yanzhong Huang, director of the Center for Global Health Studies at Seton Hall University and a senior fellow for global health at the Council on Foreign Relations. "Reporting on the cases of infections may have fallen behind the reporting on the deaths."

It's unclear whether Iran has the ability to find out how many people have been infected, which would require venturing out to towns and villages to conduct tests and not simply relying on who goes to large hospitals with severe symptoms, said Dr. William Schaffner, a professor of preventive medicine and infectious diseases at Vanderbilt University Medical Center.

"That means going to the neighborhood and knocking on doors and really aggressively trying to find cases," Schaffner said in an interview. "I don't know if they have that capacity. Many countries do not, and they don't have that tradition in their public health systems. This would be a very new thing for them to do."

Another possibility is that the patients are from an elderly, more vulnerable part of the population, Schaffner said.

If the virus "was introduced to a population that was older and as a consequence has a bunch of underlying illnesses, [that] could explain a high fatality rate," Schaffner said.

A less likely explanation is that Iran's hospitals had fallen short and patients were not getting the necessary medical care, Schaffner said. But he doubted that was the case, because Iran has a relatively advanced health care system.

Dr. John Torres, NBC News' medical correspondent, said there is no evidence of a change in the genetic profile of the virus, so the explanation for the higher mortality rate likely has to do with how the Iranians are tracking cases of infection.

"The virus has not mutated elsewhere," Torres said.

State media said Tuesday that a member of Parliament, Mamoud Sadeghi, and the country's deputy health minister, Iraj Harirchi, who lead a task force battling the virus, had tested positive. The news came a day after Harirchi appeared at a news conference looking feverish, reaching for tissues to wipe his brow. He wore no mask as the ministry spokesman standing next to him expressed confidence about the government's response to the crisis.

"I say this from the bottom of my heart. Take care of yourselves," Harirchi said in a video he took of himself that was posted after his diagnosis became public. "This is a democratic virus. It does not distinguish between rich and poor, the powerful and not powerful. It may infect a number of people."

Harirchi earlier had reacted with anger when an Iranian politician alleged that the number of deaths was much higher in Qom than the government had acknowledged. Harirchi also had appeared on television coughing during an interview.

The episode raised questions about how Iran is managing the crisis and whether officials are failing to disclose information to the public and the rest of the world. Iranian officials are already under public scrutiny over the handling of the downing of a Ukrainian airliner in January. It took the military three days to admit that the plane had been shot down by an Iranian missile in error, triggering angry street protests.

Secretary of State Pompeo said at a news conference Tuesday that "the United States is deeply concerned by information indicating the Iranian regime may have suppressed vital details about the outbreak in that country."

"All nations, including Iran, should tell the truth about the coronavirus and cooperate with international aid organizations," Pompeo added.

In Washington, top public health officials warned Tuesday that Americans should prepare for the spread of the coronavirus in communities across the country.

"It's not so much a question of if this will happen anymore but rather more a question of exactly when this will happen and how many people in this country will have severe illness," Dr. Nancy Messonnier, the head of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, told reporters.

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Why is Iran's reported mortality rate for coronavirus higher than in other countries? - NBC News