a crackdown on dissent in the run-up to today’s Majlis elections, arresting lawyers, students and journalists and targeting electronic media.
It also says Iran more than doubled the scale of its executions last year.
Ann Harrison, an Amnesty International Middle East analyst, said, “In Iran today you put yourself at risk if you do anything that might fall outside the increasingly narrow confines of what the authorities deem socially or politically acceptable.
“Anything from setting up a social group on the internet, forming or joining an NGO [non-governmental organization], or expressing your opposition to the status quo can land you in prison,” she said Tuesday in a statement.
Amnesty International said the number of executions as reported in the state media rose from 253 in 2010 to 600 in 2011. AI called those minimum figures and believes the “true number is quite a bit higher.”
It said the number of acknowledged public executions jumped almost four-fold from 14 to 50 in what “may be a strategy to spread fear among the population and to deter protests.” However, no public executions are known to have ever involved a political offense; they tend to be for gruesome and egregious crimes.
For years, China has been the most prolific executioner with Iran second. But since China has 16 times the population of Iran, the Islamic Republic is rated as having by far the highest rate of execution per million population.
Amnesty said in its report that Iranian authorities had steadily cranked up repression of dissent in the last year, launching a wave of arrests in recent months.
The arrests have targeted a range of groups, including lawyers, students, journalists, political activists and their relatives, religious and ethnic minorities, filmmakers, and people with international connections, it said.
Amnesty said the crackdown “laid bare the hollowness of Iran’s claims to support protests in the Middle East and North Africa.”
The clampdown has also targeted electronic media, seen by Iranian authorities as a major threat, the rights group said. Millions of Iranians have experienced disruption to email and Internet access in the run-up to the election, including problems accessing websites via virtual private network software, which many in Iran use to get around government filters.
The rights group urged other countries not to allow tensions over Iran’s nuclear program to distract them from pressing Iran to live up to its human rights obligations.