TEHRAN (Reuters) - Iranian police Sunday raided and closed the office of a watchdog group led by Iran's Nobel peace prize winner Shirin Ebadi ahead of a celebration to mark International Human Rights Day, a member of the group said.

Brussels - The European Union is deeply concerned at the human rights situation in the Islamic Republic of Iran. The multiple violations committed by the Iranian authorities testify to the erosion of the rights of the individual there.

Facing abusive conditions at Rajaee Shahr, outside of Tehran, a number of political prisoners began a hunger strike in January 2008 to starve themselves in protest. On January 15th, 2008 Babak Dadbakhsh, one of these political prisoners, announced his decision to join the hunger strike by literally sewing his lips together. In doing so he committed himself to a course of protest that seriously threatened his life. Worried by his deteriorating health, Human Rights Activists in Iran launched a campaign to draw the public’s attention to the dire situation of Iran’s penitentiary system, and to Dadbakhsh’s alarming health condition. The present newsletter was published when Dadbakhsh had reportedly lost consciousness. On February 25th, 2008, Human Rights Activists in Iran reported that after 46 days of hunger strike an official delegation had met with Babak Dadbakhsh and accepted his demands. Dadbakhsh was reportedly transferred to the prison’s infirmary to unstitch his lips. According to Human Rights Activists in Iran, as of April 13th, 2008, Babak Dadbakhsh was still detained in Rajaee Shahr prison waiting to be tried again for “propaganda against the regime”. This newsletter summarizes the detention conditions against which the detainees were protesting.

ُsource: Human Rights Watch

Iran’s arbitrary arrests of thousands of men and women in recent weeks under the banner of “countering immoral behavior” threaten basic rights to privacy, Human Rights Watch said today. Human Rights Watch called for the immediate release of all those detained as part of this campaign, including more than 80 people seized in a raid on a private gathering in the city of Esfahan on May 10, 2007.

Source: Human Rights Watch

" President Ahmadinejad is desperately trying to discredit his government’s many critics as American pawns. Haleh Esfandiari is a well-known advocate of dialogue between Iranian and American scholars, and the Iranian authorities are trying to coerce her into making a false confession to incriminate Iranian writers and activists. "

Source: Human Rights Watch

Source : Human Rights Watch

In an ominous move, Iran’s Ministry of Interior has ordered officials throughout the country to step up the surveillance of Iranian Bahá'ís, focusing in particular on their community activities.

The present article is a review of "Omid A Memorial in Defense of Human Rights", By Professor Francis Fukuyama, published in the Wall Street Journal. In his piece the author stresses the importance of truth and memory in strengthening the foundations of democracy.

This text is an op-ed by Anne Applebaum on "Omid, a Memorial in Defense of Human Rights". Ms. Applebaum is a member of the Washington Post editorial board and a Pulitzer prize winner. She is an expert on the Soviet penitentiary system (Gulag).

The present article was published by the International Herald Tribune. Peter Ackerman is founding chairman of the International Center on Nonviolent Conflict, and chairman of the board of the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, Tufts University. Ramin Ahmadi is co-founder of the Iran Human Rights Documentation Center, and an associate clinical professor at the Yale School of Medicin.

The present article, published in the Washington Post, reports on the recent abuses of human rights in Iran and stresses the importance of the nomination of a UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in this country.