The United Nation’s special rapporteur on human rights in Iran has told the U.N. General Assembly that there have been no fundamental improvements in Iran’s human rights situation despite token but welcome gestures undertaken since the election of Iranian president Hassan Rouhani. Ahmed Shaheed, the UN special rapporteur on human...

Iran executes more people annually than any country except for China. Since the election of Iranian president Hassan Rouhani Iran has maintained a pace of executions set to match last year’s total of roughly 500. A recent column in the Washington Post noted that while Rouhani was at the United...

An annual European Union (EU) report dedicated to to assessing Turkey’s progress in ascending to the bloc has evaluated Turkey in light of the mass anti-government protests that rocked the country last May and June. The government of Recep Tayyip Erdo has violently cracked down on demonstrators, suppressed coverage of...

Twenty-eight people were injured when relatives of an Iranian prisoner set to be executed threw a hand grenade into the prison where he was being kept in a failed attempt to prevent the execution. The attack will be read against the backdrop of ongoing executions and human rights violations being committed by...

Iranian anti-regime figures are growing increasingly wary of promises, made during the recent presidential election by eventual winner Hassan Rouhani, that the post-election environment would see significant domestic reforms. Anti-regime activists had already begun blasting Rouhani for a wave of executions which have occurred since his election. Meanwhile Green movement...

Several weeks ago what Iranian officials described as a technical “glitch” briefly gave Iranian citizens access to banned Internet sites, including social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter. The access was hailed by Western journalists as potentially “the start of a more tolerant attitude towards social media by the government”...