While the persecution detailed in the report includes wrongful imprisonment and even death sentences, it also takes more subtle forms. Ahmed Shaheed, UN special rapporteur on the situation of human rights in Iran, said Iranian Christians have reported having viruses planted on their computers after visiting Christian websites.
Iran’s regime issued a flurry of angry responses to Shaheed’s report.
"The enemies’ ploy is a vicious circle, which changes according to the political situation,” Mohammed Javad Larajani, head of Iran’s High Council for Human Rights, told the state-controlled Tehran Times. Larajani has in the past been an advocate of the stoning of women as punishment and called for Israel's destruction near the Holocaust memorial in Berlin in 2008.
Saba Farzan, a German-Iranian journalist and director of political studies at the Institute for Middle Eastern Democracy, told FoxNews.com: “The situation of Christians and other religious minorities in Iran is very dire because the Iranian regime is a Sharia state.”
“This dictatorship oppresses viciously all these precious groups with the abhorrent justification of Islamic law [Sharia] and by that it violates Iran's constitution and a long-lasting tradition within Persian culture of peaceful tolerance and respect toward fellow Iranians with diverse religious backgrounds,” Farzan said.
Such treatment of Christians belies Rouhani's stated policies, noted Morad Mokhtari, an Iranian who converted to Christianity in 1988 in Tehran and works as a human rights researcher at the New Haven-based Iran Human Rights Documentation Center. Mokhtari told FoxNews.com that in Rouhani's DecemberDraft Citizen’s Rights Charter, the document states “Holding and attending religious rituals of the religions identified in the constitution [Christianity, Jewish, Zoroastrian] is permitted.”
Mokhtari described the charter as the “good side” of Rouhani’s attitude toward some minorities but, practically speaking, the impact has been non-existent.
“For the Christians who are identified as religious minorities in the constitution, there is still no equal rights to hold and attend to their religious services even in official churches," Mokhtari said. "Since Rouhani got power, at least two official Protestant churches in Tehran have been banned to hold any religious services in Persian language.”
Benjamin Weinthal reports on the Christians in the Middle East. He is a fellow at the Foundation For Defense of Democracies. Follow Benjamin on Twitter@BenWeinthal
