Two months after anti-regime activists blasted the regime for “spreading lies and disinformation about the existence of political prisoners as they are simultaneously imprisoning hundreds for exercising their legal rights,” former Iranian President Mohammad Khatami is calling on Tehran to release all the country’s political prisonersKhatami published his comments on his official website following an announcement Monday from Tehran that the government would free 80 prisoners arrested in political crackdowns.:

“I am happy about this news but I say why this number? I should say all, unless someone has truly committed a crime and has been found guilty in a competent court. Many of them haven’t done anything; many of the charges were wrong,” Khatami said.

Iranian officials have consistently denied even the existence of political prisoners. According to the State Department, Iran’s High Council for Human Rights Mohammed Javad Larijani sophistically insisted last year that there are no political prisoners in Iran:

In a July 8 interview with the semi-official Iran Student News Agency (ISNA), Mohammad Javad Larijani stated, “A political prisoner is someone who has been politically active within the framework of the laws but has been unjustly imprisoned because the rulers and state authorities did not like what he was doing. According to this definition, there are no political prisoners inside the Islamic Republic of Iran.”

Tehran has nonetheless been consistently blasted by human rights groups for the mass systematic imprisonment, torture, and rape of political prisoners.

Since the June election of President Hassan Rouhani, Iran has executed more than 170 political prisoners and continues to imprison nearly 800 more.

Among those still jailed is U.S. citizen Amir Hekmati, a former Marine who was arrested more than two years ago while on a trip to visit a relative and whose father on Wednesday forwarded a letter to Rouhani pleading with him to free his son. Analysts have raised doubts about Rouhani’s ability and willingness to substantially reform Iran’s prison system.

The revolutionary-era cleric has repeatedly called for the imprisonment of dissidents, and his justice minister Mostafa Pourmohammadi is a former intelligence minister who was a key figure on a three-person panel that oversaw the torture and execution of literally thousands of Iranian prisoners.

[Photo: Micah_68 / Flickr]