Persecution In Iran By The Government

Iran's Idea of "Human Rights": Persecute Christians

• Not only does Iran persecute its Christian minorities, but it also tries to coerce them to embrace Islam -- despite Rouhani's boasts before the UN that "Iran does not seek to... impose its official religion on others..."
  
  
• "Rouhani wants to prove that he is a good Muslim by persecuting Christians....The authorities are trying to eradicate Christianity, just as the Islamic State group, but smarter." — Iranian Christian living in hiding, BosNewsLife, September 7, 2017.
  
  
• "If a prisoner's case got [international media] attention, they stopped torturing or raping them because they knew the world was watching...." — Mohabat News, October 23, 2017.
  
  

In a speech before the United Nations on September 20, 2017, presumably as a way to support his claim that Israel is "a rogue and racist regime [that] trample[s] upon the most basic rights of the Palestinians," Iranian President Hassan Rouhani repeatedly portrayed his government as dedicated to "moderation and respect for human rights," adding:

"We in Iran strive to build peace and promote the human rights of peoples and nations. We never condone tyranny and we always defend the voiceless. We never threaten anyone..."

One need only look to Iran's Christians -- who form 1% of its entire population -- to test these claims. Unlike the persecution other Christian minorities experience in Muslim majority nations -- which often comes at the hands of Muslim individuals, mobs, or professional terrorists -- the primary driver of Christian persecution in Iran is the government itself.

The 2018 World Watch List, compiled by Open Doors -- a human rights organization that highlights the global persecution of Christians -- makes this clear. Iran is among the top ten worst nations where Christians experience "extreme persecution":

Whereas most persecution of Christians in the Arab Gulf region comes from society or radical Islamic groups, the main threat for believers in Iran comes from the government. The Iranian regime declares the country to be a Shia Islamic State and is constantly expanding its influence. Hardliners within the regime are vehemently opposed to Christianity, and create severe problems for Christians, particularly converts from Islam. Christians and other minorities are seen as threats to this end, and are persecuted as a result. Iranian society as a whole is more tolerant than their leadership, thanks in part due to the influence of moderate and mystical Sufi Islam.

Discussing this trend, Middle East Concern, another human rights organization, says:

A great many Iranians have been coming to Christ and it's something which the authorities are clearly very unhappy about. So there are periodic arrests, detentions, [and] imprisonments. There have been a lot of charges lately which are suggesting an even greater clampdown—sentences of 10-15 years in some cases for Christians. And usually, the authorities will suggest that this [is] the result of undermining the state or seeking to collaborate against the state and will use more political charges than say apostasy or blasphemy laws.

In June 2017, for example, four Muslim converts to Christianity, who were arrested a month earlier in raids on house-churches, were each sentenced to 10 years in prison.

"The four men were officially charged with 'acting against national security,' a catch-all charge often used by the Iranian government to punish different types of religious and political dissent. The government often uses it against converts instead of the charge of apostasy, according to freedom of religion advocates, in an attempt to avoid international scrutiny."

Most recently, another convert to Christianity, Naser Navard Gol-Tapeh, inquired about the charge for which he was convicted, "Action against national security through the establishment of house churches." In an August 2018 open letter to the Iranian court that sentenced him to ten years in prison, he asked:

"...is the fellowship of a few Christian brothers and sisters in someone's home, singing worship songs, reading the Bible and worshiping God acting against national security? Isn't it a clear violation of civil and human rights, and an absolute injustice to receive a ten-year prison sentence just for organising 'house churches'"...

Although the official reason Iranian authorities give in all these arrests and convictions is that such Christian activities are tantamount to "crimes against national security," it seems that the real reason is hostility to religions other than Iran's indigenous religious denominations. For instance, "[w]hile the government is anti-Christian, it does grant some limited freedoms to historical [non-Protestant] Christian churches," according to the World Watch List.