Insideofiran/2010-07-27 - Mohammed Larijanis interview at the human rights conference in Genève on 15-06-2010.

Mohammed Larajani is the Iranian Government’s representative for Human Rights.

Mohammed Larajani: They asked us, why we allow torture in our country while we have signed the human rights conventions against torture? This is because they see some of our punishments such as flogging as torture. But we don’t view these types of punishments such as flogging as torture. We don’t agree on this point, we don’t see flogging as torture, torture is not given as punishment.

It is because of these technical differences that we are told that we don’t obey human rights conventions against torture, but as we explained this is really a fundamental and intellectual issue for discussion.

I am saying this because our reports are discussed in open atmosphere and this fact surprises the representatives of the western countries. Countries such as USA, UK and two or three other countries came out with many allegations. They accused us of conducting torture with reference to the troubles after the recent election.

They wept crocodile tears and brought up the name of our poor citizen…

(Larajani hesitates and the reporter fills in: you mean “Neda Aqa Soltan”.)

Mohammed Larijani: Neda Aqa Soltan was really a martyr who became victim of the plans of those who were responsible for the after-election-troubles, and they are the main suspects for her murder and are walking around freely in Tel Aviv and other European capitals.

So they shed crocodile tears and created an atmosphere around this death. But what was unexpected was that after the event some 10-15 countries spoke well about Iran, the Islamic revolution, the last decade and different parts of its human rights record.

Reporter: Were these representatives from Arabian, African countries or did they represent the majority of the entire international population?

Mohammed Larijani: They were from everywhere, there was representatives from China, Russia speaking well of Iran, and even Japan spoke well of Iran. There were also representative of Latin America, African, Arabian, and Muslim countries who spoke well of Iran. It was a unique atmosphere.

The westerners were surprised. Their plan was to create a new attitude towards Iran but they failed. Again the representative of USA came out and repeated the same accusations. And afterwards United Kingdom followed with same accusations against us and then countries like Norway or Denmark, I don’t clearly remember now, also entered the discussions.

And again after that 6-7 countries rejected their accusations and broke the atmosphere.

But we also gave clear answers to USA. We gave examples of United States killing American citizens and also citizens of other countries in the name of “fighting terrorism”.

They commit murder while their capitals are in fact paradise for well known terrorists.

In this manner, the chairman of the meeting who was on their side and came from Belgium was forced to intervene and end the discussions.

This anti-Islamic attitude represents one of the negative aspects of the western world. Not so long ago, the new prime minister of Denmark who has a little brain, you can see this from his face, said during his first speech: “my problem is with Islam”.

In reality he is a small atom in front of Islam. Islam is like a large mountain and as we have seen in the past, people who hit their head against this mountain lose their head.

I want to explain his negativity. Why did he say such things? It is because according to their own statistics by 2025 Copenhagen will be the first European city with a Muslim majority.

The translation is done by The International committee for support of Sufis and Students in Iran

We would like to remind the readers that the Islamic republic of Iran is in process of building a center for its activities in the disguise of a mosque with a budget of over 5 million Euros.