November 18, 2016
Judiciary Chairman Sadeq Larijani last week accused President Rohani of hypocrisy, saying that, despite his recent public call to recognize freedom of expression, Rohani had contacted Larijani asking that he shut down a newspaper.
Speaking at the Tehran Press Exhibition November 5, Rohani said the news media can’t serve the public interest if reporters do not feel safe while doing their jobs: “Broken pens and gagged mouths cannot do anything. We must boldly defend responsible freedoms in society. Security is most important for us, but we can’t achieve and preserve it with guns alone.”
Two days later, Larijani chided the president: “My dear brother, you have often asked me in writing and in person, with and without intermediaries, why I haven’t taken action against a certain newspaper. Yet when you talk around reporters you raise your voice in defense of freedom and declare than ‘pens should not broken and mouths should not be gagged.’ Of course, we won’t listen to any of this talk and we will continue on the path of the law,” he said.
Hours later, Hamid Abou-talebi, one of the president’s senior political advisers, fired back on Twitter, which is banned in Iran: “Freedom of expression is different from lies and slander. You cannot claim to be supporting freedom of expression by spreading lies and accusations. The former should be uplifted and the latter should be suppressed.”
Aboutalebi was presumably referring to the Judiciary’s tolerant attitude toward hardline newspapers that have attacked Rohani’s policies.
Rohani has criticized the Judiciary’s restrictive stance on freedom of expression on a number of occasions. In April 2014, he said: “All people and groups have the right to criticize, regardless of whether they represent the minority or the majority. What we don’t approve of is when someone takes money from the national treasury and starts a newspaper and then instead of [constructive] criticism proceeds to launch destructive attacks on a government elected by the majority of the people.”
He added, “We want all [members of the press] to clearly identity themselves and their political affiliation. They should represent their own faction instead of claiming to speak for the Iranian people as a whole.”
In his rebuke of the president, Larijani did not specify what newspaper Rohani had allegedly sought to have shut. However, in 2016 the Judiciary and the Culture Ministry, whose minister is appointed by the president, were publicly at odds over the continued publication of the radical weekly, Ya Lesarat, the official publication of the ultraconservative vigilante group, Ansar-e Hezbollah, which is best known for beating up people with whom it disagrees.
On July 28, Ya Lesarat published a feature attacking some Iranian actors, alleging that they had “no honor” for allowing their wives to appear in improper dress. The piece was titled, Dayyous Keest?” (Who’s a Cuckold?); the Persian word “dayyous” refers to husbands who allow their wives to have intercourse with other men.
Last December, Vice President for Women and Family Affairs Shahindokht Molaverdi threatened to sue the weekly for describing her as “worse than the most famous prostitute in the world.”
Shortly afterward, the weekly’s publication permit was revoked by the Ministry of Culture’s Press Monitoring Board, but it resumed pub-lication two days later because the Judiciary refused to shut it down.
The Judiciary’s leniency toward Ya Lesarat contrasts with the prison sentences it has issued against its critics. Most recently, journalist Yashar Soltani was imprisoned in September for “spreading lies” and “gathering classified information with the intent to harm national security” after his website published an unclassified official document citing corruption in the Tehran Municipality.
Prosecutor General Mo-hammad-Jafar Montazeri later verified the accuracy of the information Soltani had published about city properties being sold to favored people at illegal discounts.