45th Session of the UN Universal Periodic Review

Male Guardianship Rules Hamper Travel, Other Movement

• Many Middle East and North Africa countries still prevent women from moving freely in their own country or traveling abroad without the permission of a male guardian.
• Women in the region are fighting rules that authorities often claim are for their protection, but that deprive women of their rights and enable men to control and abuse them at will.
• All authorities in the Middle East and North Africa should eliminate any and all discriminatory restrictions on women’s freedom of movement including all male guardianship rules.

Human Rights Watch – (Beirut) – Many Middle East and North African countries still prevent women from moving freely in their own country or traveling abroad without the permission of a male guardian, Human Rights Watch said in a report released today.

The 119-page report, “Trapped: How Male Guardianship Policies Restrict Women’s Travel and Mobility in the Middle East and North Africa,” says that although women’s rights activists have succeeded in securing women’s increased freedoms in many countries in the region, old and new restrictions require women to seek permission from their male guardian – typically their father, brother, or husband – to move within their country, obtain a passport, or travel abroad. Human Rights Watch also found that in a number of countries, women cannot travel abroad with their children on an equal basis with men.

Detaining Ahmed Mansoor Sends Chilling Message

(Human Rights Watch ) – Ahmed Mansoor, the United Arab Emirates’ (UAE) best-known human rights defender, has been arbitrarily imprisoned, in isolation, since security forces raided his home just before midnight on March 20, 2017. Local media reported he was arrested and convicted for publishing “false news” on social media to “harm the reputation of the state.”

This week, governments are meeting in Bonn to prepare for the November climate summit, COP28, to be hosted by the UAE. The fate of Mansoor and the many other arbitrarily detained human rights activists should worry these governments. A sustained assault on freedom of expression and association sends a chilling message to civil society and Indigenous peoples working to achieve an ambitious outcome at COP28.

Governments in Bonn should take every opportunity, in public comments and private huddles, to press Emirati authorities, which also hold the COP28 presidency, to end its persecution of rights defenders and peaceful dissidents and free them. They should start with Ahmed Mansoor, who, for his human rights advocacy, was sentenced to 10 years in prison, where authorities have denied him essential medical care and have rarely allowed him contact with his family.

Unless the UN and other governments demand that the UAE ease its grip on civic space and uphold rights, there’s a real risk that many participants at COP28 will stay silent for fear of reprisals. This could disastrously impact the summit’s success and its stated aim of delivering solutions for an increasingly urgent climate crisis, including a reference to phasing out all fossil fuels in the COP28 outcome document.

Image by Neil Dodhia from Pixabay

Yet UAE authorities appear to be doubling down on silencing critics. The Abu Dhabi Judicial Department recently warned that “harming the reputation of the state and its institutions” in the form of news, data, or visual images could incur a 5-year jail term and 500,000 Dirham fine. “Everyone must pay attention before talking about their experiences or publishing pictures … so as not to put themselves in harm’s way.”

( Human Rights Watch ) – Two Bahraini Shi’a men have been executed in Saudi Arabia following what Amnesty International described as a “grossly unfair trial” on terrorism-related charges.

Jaafar Sultan and Sadeq Thamer were arrested in May 2015 and held incommunicado for more than three months, according to Amnesty International. The charges were related to allegations of smuggling explosives inside Saudi Arabia and participating in protests in Bahrain.

The two Bahrainis were tried and sentenced to death in Saudi’s notorious Specialized Criminal Court in October 2021 following protest-related charges that fall within the Saudi counterterrorism law.

Saudi Arabia and Bahrain, as well as other Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries, continue to use overbroad provisions contained within terrorism laws to suppress dissent and target religious minorities.

Counterterrorism laws in the GCC typically include broad, vague charges and definitions of terrorism used as catch-all provisions to punish peaceful dissidents, political activists, and human rights defenders.

Saudi Arabia’s Shi’a Muslim minority has long suffered systemic discrimination and been targeted by state-funded hate speech. On March 12, 2022, Saudi Arabian authorities executed 81 men, 41 of whom are said to belong to the Shi’a Muslim minority, under its counterterrorism law, despite promises to curtail executions.

Bahrain’s Shi’a majority also suffers from discrimination. Bahraini authorities have systematically targeted Shia clerics and have violently arrested numerous human rights defenders with Shia backgrounds, including Abdulhadi al-Khawaja in April 2011, who they sentenced to life in prison in a mass trial under Bahrain’s terrorism law.

Overly broad terrorism charges have also been exploited by other Gulf states. The United Arab Emirates (UAE) sentenced Khalaf Abdul Rahman al-Romaithi to 15 years in prison on terrorism charges following a grossly unfair trial known as the “UAE94” mass trials of 94 critics of the Emirati government. Al-Romaithi was recently extradited from Jordan to the UAE.

Human Rights Watch has documented longstanding violations of due process and fair trial rights in Saudi Arabia’s criminal justice system, making it unlikely that Sultan and Thamer received a fair trial leading up to their execution. Human Rights Watch opposes the death penalty in all countries and under all circumstances as a cruel and inhumane punishment.

Via Human Rights Watch

Documents & Links

• US20230110_2
  pdf 540 KB
• Why the Godfather of Human Rights Is Not Welcome at Harvard by Michael Massing (The Nation, Jan 5 2023)
• A Human-Rights Leader Was Denied a Harvard Post Over Alleged ‘Anti-Israel Bias.’ Now a Dean Faces Calls to Resign by Emma Pettit (The Chronicle of Higher Education, Jan 11 2023)

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Bonus video added by Informed Comment:

MSNBC: “Free speech seems to see different standards for anti-Israel criticism | The Mehdi Hasan Show”

On December 5, 2022, the Forces of Freedom and Change (FFC), which formed the civilian component of the former transitional government, signed a new “framework agreement” with the military leadership and other political parties. The document lays out basic principles and government structures but defers five key contentious issues, including transitional justice and security sector reform, to a second phase of talks.

“The last 14 months have shown how widespread impunity fosters more killings and other abuses,” said Mohamed Osman, Sudan researcher at Human Rights Watch. “Accountability is critical for the future and should not be swept under the rug.”

This agreement comes over a year after military leaders ousted the power-sharing transitional government on October 25, 2021 and killed 122 people in the protests that followed.

The agreement states that the incoming transitional government will be formed by civilians and that all government forces will be under civilian leadership. The vaguely worded agreement lays out general principles for the formation of the transitional institutions and reiterates commitments to promote freedoms and rights and accountability, and to reform security forces. The agreement, however, fails to spell out any clear time frames, details, or benchmarks for justice and security sector reform, stating that plans are to be discussed at a second stage.

Protest groups, including resistance committees, rejected the agreement, objecting as they have done since the coup to any new power-sharing with the coup leaders in light of their involvement in the coup and security force abuses since then. The FFC contends that deferring justice and security sector reform plans to a later phase allows for more consultation with stakeholders and families of those killed. But the agreement does not provide any details on the process, nor does it contain benchmarks or consequences for failure to achieve these reforms, Human Rights Watch said.

Since the military coup, security forces have been violently dispersing peaceful protests. Security forces have carried out widespread arbitrary arrests, incommunicado detention, and in some cases ill-treatment, torture, and sexual violence.

While many detained protesters were released in May, arrests of protesters have continued and at least 12 remain in detention facing two separate trials, one for the alleged killing of a senior police commander and the second for the alleged killing of a military intelligence sergeant. Human Rights Watch documented ill treatment at arrest and torture in detention of at least two of the detainees standing trial, Mohamed Adam, who was 17 year old at time of arrest, known as “Tupac” and Ahmed al-Nanna.

International supporters, including the “Quad” countries, the United States, United Kingdom, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and the United Nations, should seize this moment to call for the release of all those unjustly detained following the coup, as well as to ensure that peaceful protesters, including those who oppose the agreement, can exercise their freedoms safely, Human Rights Watch said.

Junta leaders have said that all post-coup abuses would be investigated, but there have been no meaningful steps to hold those responsible to account.

A draft proposal seen by Human Rights Watch and reported by media outlets says that junta leaders requested immunity from prosecution for post-coup abuses and that the only cases brought forward will be against subordinates. The FFC has denied agreeing to this proposal, saying it cannot be done without “consultation and broad acceptance of stakeholders.”

Rifaat Makkawi, a lawyer working with families of those killed in post-coup protests, said that there have been no effective steps to investigate or prosecute those responsible. “Many of the obstacles we are facing, such as lifting immunity of officials or getting prosecutors to collect evidence instead of asking families to take on that burden, are problems we also had during the transition,” he told Human Rights Watch.

During the upended transition, Human Rights Watch documented only limited progress on domestic justice initiatives. Despite making commitments and forming multiple investigation committees, the transitional authorities failed to develop a clear justice strategy or to allocate sufficient resources to the justice sector while security forces have refused to cooperate with investigations. Investigations and a handful of prosecutions against officials for past abuses have focused on low-ranking officers.

The agreement largely overlooks Darfur, the site of almost two decades of conflict and serious abuses. During the former transition as well as following the coup, the authorities failed to protect civilians or roll out any form of accountability efforts, leaving civilians there vulnerable to ongoing cycles of attacks, Human Rights Watch said. Sudanese political forces and their international and regional backers should ensure that any transition process guarantees substantial accountability measures. The situation in Darfur in particular should be addressed, both to improve protection of civilians and to provide justice for past and recent abuses, including through the surrender of the suspects wanted by the International Criminal Court including Omar al-Bashir, the former longtime ruler, who is in government custody. They should prioritize key reforms to the justice sector and ensure that coup leaders or others implicated in serious abuses are not shielded from being held to account, Human Rights Watch said.

International backers should also unequivocally reject any form of impunity for serious crimes, notably for those in position of command, Human Rights Watch said.

“Sudan’s recent and past history shows all too clearly the dangers of kicking the justice can down the road,” Osman said. “Sudan’s political leaders should take seriously calls for justice by protesters and other stakeholders.”

Via Human Rights Watch

An investigation by Human Rights Watch attributed the phishing attack to an entity affiliated with the Iranian government known as APT42 and sometimes referred to as Charming Kitten. The technical analysis conducted jointly by Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International’s Security Lab identified 18 additional victims who have been targeted as part of the same campaign. The email and other sensitive data of at least three of them had been compromised: a correspondent for a major US newspaper, a women’s rights defender based in the Gulf region, and Nicholas Noe, an advocacy consultant for Refugees International based in Lebanon.

“Iran’s state-backed hackers are aggressively using sophisticated social engineering and credential harvesting tactics to access sensitive information and contacts held by Middle East-focused researchers and civil society groups,” said Abir Ghattas, information security director at Human Rights Watch. “This significantly increases the risks that journalists and human rights defenders face in Iran and elsewhere in the region.”

For the three people whose accounts were known to be compromised, the attackers gained access to their emails, cloud storage drives, calendars, and contacts and also performed a Google Takeout, using a service that exports data from the core and additional services of a Google account.

Various security companies have reported on phishing campaigns by APT42 targeting Middle East-focused researchers, civil society groups, and dissidents. Most of them identify APT42 based on targeting patterns and technical evidence. Organizations such as Google and the cybersecurity companies Recorded Future, Proofpoint, and Mandiant have linked APT 42 to Iranian authorities. Identifying and naming a threat actor helps researchers to identify, track, and link hostile cyber activity.

In October 2022, a Human Rights Watch staff member working on the Middle East and North Africa region received suspicious messages on WhatsApp from a person pretending to work for a think tank based in Lebanon, inviting them to a conference. The joint investigation revealed that the phishing links sent via WhatsApp, once clicked, directed the target to a fake login page that captured the user’s email password and authentication code. The research team investigated the infrastructure that hosted the malicious links and identified additional targets of this ongoing campaign.

Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International contacted the 18 high profile individuals identified as targets of this campaign. Fifteen of them responded and confirmed that they had received the same WhatsApp messages at some point between September 15 and November 25, 2022.

On November 23, 2022, a second Human Rights Watch staff member was also targeted. They received the same WhatsApp messages from the same number that contacted other targets.

Social engineering and phishing attempts remain key components of Iranian cyberattacks. Since 2010, Iranian operators have targeted members of foreign governments, militaries, and businesses, as well as political dissidents and human rights defenders. Over time, these attacks have become more sophisticated in the ways they execute what is known as “social engineering.”

According to Mandiant, a US-based cybersecurity company, APT42 has been responsible for several phishing attacks in Europe, the US, and the Middle East and North Africa region. On September 14, 2022, the US Office of Foreign Assent Control at the Treasury Department imposed sanctions on individuals affiliated with the group.

Via Pixabay.

The investigation also revealed inadequacies in Google’s security protections to safeguard its users’ data. Individuals successfully targeted by the phishing attack told Human Rights Watch that they did not realize their Gmail accounts had been compromised or a Google Takeout had been initiated, in part because the security warnings under Google’s account activity do not push or display any permanent notification in a user’s inbox or send a push message to the Gmail app on their phone.

Google’s security activity revealed that the attackers accessed the targets’ accounts almost immediately after the compromise, and they maintained access to the accounts until the Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International research team informed them and assisted them in removing the attacker’s connected device.

Google should promptly strengthen its Gmail account security warnings to better protect journalists, human rights defenders, and its most at-risk users from attacks, Human Rights Watch said.

“In a Middle East region rife with surveillance threats for activists, it’s essential for digital security researchers to not only publish and promote findings, but also prioritize the protection of the region’s embattled activists, journalists, and civil society leaders,” Ghattas said.

Technical Analysis of the Phishing Campaign

On October 18, 2022, a Human Rights Watch staff member working on the Middle East and North Africa region received a message on WhatsApp that claimed to be from a Lebanon-based think tank and invited the recipient to a conference. The invitation used the same format as previous invitations from the think tank, indicating a sophisticated level of social engineering. The person impersonated by the threat actor group APT42 in the WhatsApp messages previously worked for the think tank.

The Human Rights Watch staff member forwarded these messages to the information security team, which confirmed they were a phishing attempt. If the person had clicked on the cutly[.]biz link, they would have been redirected to the URL https://sharefilesonline[.]live/xxxxxx/BI-File-2022.html which hosts a fake Microsoft login page.

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The cutly[.]biz domain is a custom URL shortener deployed and managed by the attacker’s group, designed to mimic the name of the legitimate URL shortener cutt.ly.

The phishing link sent to the Human Rights Watch staff member included a random path of five characters, both lowercase letters and numbers, which represents around 6 million combinations, making it possible to enumerate all of the existing paths on the attacker’s infrastructure to find other existing links. This enumeration led to the discovery of 44 valid URLs, with many of them redirecting to a phishing page that displayed the email address of the target. The phishing pages were specifically crafted to mimic Microsoft, Google, or Yahoo login pages.

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Further investigation showed that the phishing kit allowed the bypass of multi-factor authentication methods other than a hardware security key. Multi-factor authentication (MFA), often called two-factor authentication, or 2FA, requires a second means of authentication, in addition to a password. Common second factors include a temporary code delivered by SMS, a temporary code given by a smartphone application (such as FreeOTP or Google Authenticator), and a code generated by a Hardware Security Key (like Yubikey or Solo Key). Through different technical means, it is possible to create phishing toolkits that bypass MFA when the temporary code is delivered by SMS or by a smartphone application. It is not possible at present for a phishing kit to bypass multi-factor authentication using hardware keys.

The WhatsApp chats of those who were known to be successfully targeted reveal that the attackers were repeatedly engaging with the targets as they clicked through the phishing links. After entering their credentials on the phishing page, targets were prompted to enter a code on the 2FA bypass page, which the attackers used to gain access to their email accounts. Phishing kits with MFA bypass features have been common since at least 2018, and Amnesty International’s Security Lab has documented multiple usages of such kits against human rights defenders in 2018 and 2020.

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Targeting of Journalists and Human Rights Defenders by APT42

In addition to the two Human Rights Watch staff members, Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International identified 18 other email accounts targeted as part of the same campaign, including six journalists.

Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International contacted all of the individuals and 15 responded. They confirmed they were all targeted with the exact same social engineering approach during the period between September 15 and November 25, 2022. Out of the 20 targets, at least three had been compromised by the threat actor. Confirming the compromise led the research team to additional information about the data exfiltration process. Human Rights Watch also supported the journalists by disconnecting the attackers from their accounts and re-securing them.

The compromise gave the attackers access to the targets’ emails, cloud storage drives, calendars, and contacts. In at least one case, the attacker synced the target’s mailbox and performed a Google Takeout, a service that exports all of an account’s activity and information including web searches, payments, travel and locations, ads clicked on, YouTube activity, and additional account information. It is the most comprehensive and intrusive method to export data in a Google account.

Google’s security activity revealed that the attackers had accessed the targets’ accounts almost immediately after the compromise and that they had access for about five days until Human Rights Watch informed the targets and helped remove the attacker’s connected device.

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Attribution

The Human Rights Watch Information Security team attributes these attacks with high confidence to the Iranian threat actor APT42, also called TA453 by Proofpoint, Phosphorus by Microsoft, and Charming Kitten by ClearSky and CERTFA based on specific technical indicators linked to the phishing attacks and operational infrastructure used by the attackers when accessing compromised accounts. The list of APT42’s targets that Human Rights Watch identified all relate to the Middle East, including Iran, and one compromised account was accessed by an IP address based in Tehran (see the technical details sections). Several organizations have confirmed this attribution based on their own research into related campaigns.

Many organizations, such as Google, and the cybersecurity companies Recorded Future and Proofpoint, who have investigated APT42 attacks, have concluded that APT42 operates on behalf of Iranian authorities. In September, the American cybersecurity company, Mandiant, attributed APT42’s activities to the Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.

The source code of the phishing page used against the 20 targets includes JavaScript code that is very similar to code that was used on a phishing page hosted on the domain mailer-daemon[.]net in November 2022, which was part of a phishing campaign attributed by Recorded Future to the Iranian threat actor APT42. The same code was also found on continuetogo[.]me in August 2021, which was part of a phishing campaign attributed by Google to Iranian government-backed threat actors.

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The second Human Rights Watch staff member who was targeted on November 23, 2022, received the same WhatsApp messages from the same number that contacted other targets. The malicious link shared with the staff was hosted on mailer-daemon[.]org and the attackers used the same URL shortener (cutly[.]biz) to hide the full name of the domain.

The use of fake, uncommon, or custom URL shorteners was also seen in attacks attributed to other Iranian threat actors such as Phosphorus against Israeli and US targets in June 2022, for which they used litby[.]us.

The investigation of the attacker’s infrastructure showed that the same group registered the domain uani[.]us, a typo-squatted domain that copies an advocacy group based in the United States called United Against Nuclear Iran, which was targeted by Charming Kitten in November 2021.

All of the IP addresses used to connect to the compromised accounts were from the Express VPN (Virtual Private Network) service. Nevertheless, Human Rights Watch found one Iranian IP address, 5.160.239.XXX, that connected to one of the target’s inboxes. This could potentially be the public IP address of the attacker’s own network, perhaps revealed after they forgot to enable their VPN before connecting.

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One of the most notable characteristics of Iranian government-backed threat groups is their highly targeted spear-phishing, social engineering techniques, and impersonation of conference and summit organizers to build trust and rapport with their targets. In this attack, APT42 used the Lebanon-based think tank to trick their targets. The organizers of the Munich Security Conference and Think 20 (T20) Summit in Saudi Arabia have been impersonated in similar ways.  

The recent Mandiant report on APT42 has provided more detailed information into the difference and links between the APT35 and APT42 groups, both of which Mandiant attributes to Iran’s IRGC. The CERTFA, for instance, has reattributed a campaign to APT42 instead of APT35 after this publication.

Technical Details on Post-Compromise Action and Indicators of Compromise

During the investigation, Human Rights Watch supported journalists and human rights defenders who were compromised by this phishing campaign. This gave Human Rights Watch insight into the attackers’ post-compromise actions.

In at least one case, the attackers performed a Google Takeout request, a service that exports all of an account’s activity and information, including web searches, payments, travel and locations, ads clicked on, YouTube activity, and additional account information. It is the most comprehensive and intrusive method to export data in a Google account. The use of Google Takeout to extract data from a compromised account is in line with the features of the HYPERSCRAPE tool identified by the Google TAG team, although Human Rights Watch could not confirm if the tool was used based on logs to which it had access.

For several targets, the attacker synchronized the compromised mailbox to a Microsoft service in order to export the contents of the mailbox. As far as we know, it is the first time that this behavior is reported as a post-compromise tactic used by APT42.

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Google’s security activity revealed that the attackers accessed the targets’ accounts almost immediately after the compromise, and that they maintained access until we informed the targets and assisted them to remove the attacker’s connected device.

Based on Google Security logs, we identified the IP addresses used to connect to a compromised account.

We observed the same computer name connected to all of the compromised accounts: DESKTOP-F8QNCC0.

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Indicators of Compromise

WhatsApp numbers used by the attackers:

1. +1-234-312-1624
2. +1-209-233-0560
3. +1-804-500-1154

cutly[.]biz

hxxps://sharefilesonline[.]live/xxxxxx/BI-File-2022.html

hxxps://sharefilesonline[.]live/xxxxxx/G-check-first.html

hxxps://sharefilesonline[.]live/xxxxxx/G-transfer.html

hxxps://sharefilesonline[.]live/xxxxxx/continue.html

hxxps://sharefilesonline[.]live/xxxxxx/index.php

hxxps://mailer-daemon[.]net/file=sharing=system/xxxxxx/first.check.html

hxxp://mailer-daemon[.]org/ xxxxxx /index.php

DESKTOP-F8QNCC0

5.160.239.XXX

Via Human Rights Watch

Branch 29 of Tehran’s revolutionary court sentenced Mehdi Mahmoudian and Mostafa Nili to four years in prison and a two-year ban from media appearances, Babak Paknia, Mahmoudian’s lawyer, told Emtedad news outlet. The court also sentenced the three other defendants, Arash Keykhosravi, Mohammadreza Faghihi, and Maryam Afrafaraz to two years, one year, and 95 days in prison respectively, and imposed a two-year ban on practicing law against Nili and one-year legal practice ban against Keykhosravi. Paknia said that the defendants are planning to appeal their convictions.

“Sending human rights defenders to prison for attempting to hold the government accountable for its dismal mismanagement of the Covid-19 crisis is sadly an unsurprising outcome in Iran,” said Tara Sepehri Far, Senior Iran Researcher at Human Rights Watch. “Iranian judicial authorities seem more concerned with protecting the state from scrutiny than delivering justice for ordinary people.”

On August 14, 2021, Iranian authorities arbitrarily arrested seven human rights defenders, four of them lawyers, as they prepared to file the complaint in court under Iranian law, over the authorities’ mismanagement of the pandemic response. The complaint was against the country’s national task force against Covid-19, including the health minister and other officials.

Two rights defenders, Leila Heydari and Mohammad Hadi Erfanian, both lawyers, were released without charge after a few hours. The five others initially faced charges that included “establishing an illegal group” and “propaganda against the state.” Keykhosravi, Nili, Faghihi, and Afrafaraz were released on bail in August 2021 while Mahmoudian remains in prison.

Mahmoudian is currently serving a four-year prison sentence he previously received on politically motivated charges of “propaganda against the state,” and “assembly and collusion to act against national security.” The charges were brought for his peaceful support for victims of state repression including for calling for a vigil for the victims of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard’s downing of Ukraine International Airlines Flight 752 in January 2020. Mahmoudian should be freed, and his 2020 conviction should also be quashed, Human Rights Watch said.

On April 16, a judge at branch 29 of Tehran’s revolutionary court dropped previous charges against the group but introduced the new charge of “assembly and collusion to act against national security” that can carry a penalty of up to five years in prison. This is the offense the five were convicted of in June. The judge reportedly did not allow Paknia, Mahmoudian’s lawyer, to attend the second session of the trial, compromising Mahmoudian’s right to an effective defense.

Paknia told Emtedad news that the judge also refused to allow the trial to be public. Under Iran’s criminal procedure law, court hearings should be public unless they are for “forgivable crimes,” such as certain categories of robbery, harassment, and intentional harm to property, or those that “disturb public safety or religious or ethnic sentiments.”

Paknia told the media that the verdict cites the group’s private conversations on the social media application Club House about their plans to file the complaint with the judiciary as evidence of their intent to act against national security.

Iran has been hit hard by Covid-19, with more than 140,000 deaths. Yet the government response was mired in a lack of transparency, and politicization of the pandemic, Human Rights Watch said. Iranian authorities initially banned procuring the US- and UK-produced vaccines and prioritized and publicly promoted the production of a domestic vaccine with substantial government resources. However, experts have raised concerns over the lack of transparency about the vaccine’s safety and efficacy and the company’s production fell seriously behind schedule without any clear explanation.

Under article 34 of the Iranian Constitution, “it is the indisputable right of every citizen to seek justice by recourse to the competent court.” In addition, articles 170 and 173 of the constitution state that every citizen has the right to complain before a court when regulation of the government conflicts with laws or norms.

“Human rights defenders in Iran should be able to carry out their peaceful activities without fear of state reprisal,” Sepehri Far said.

Via Human Rights Watch

Sometimes apologists for the over 50-year Israeli military Occupation of what are now about 5 million Palestinians try to argue that their situation is not exactly like that in South Africa. Well, for one thing, many South Africans who have been to the West Bank have said that it is worse than their Apartheid or racial segregation policy.

But an exact comparison with South Africa is by now beside the point.

I observed elsewhere,

. . . the Rome Statute that established the International Criminal Court adopted a universalized definition of Apartheid practices unconstrained by the South African historical model, which is intended to be applied to other societies in the world.

As HRW [Human Rights Watch] notes, the Rome Statute defines Apartheid as “inhumane acts… committed in the context of an institutionalized regime of systematic oppression and domination by one racial group over any other racial group or groups and committed with the intention of maintaining that regime.”

That language clearly does describe Israeli activities in the West Bank and Gaza.

HRW continues:

“The crime of apartheid under the Apartheid Convention and Rome Statute consists of three primary elements: an intent to maintain a system of domination by one racial group over another; systematic oppression by one racial group over another; and one or more inhumane acts, as defined, carried out on a widespread or systematic basis pursuant to those policies.

Among the inhumane acts identified in either the Convention or the Rome Statute are “forcible transfer,” “expropriation of landed property,” “creation of separate reserves and ghettos,” and denial of the “the right to leave and to return to their country, [and] the right to a nationality.”

As the Israeli Human Rights organization B’Tselem also pointed out, between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean there are now 6.8 million Jews and 6.8 million Palestinians, all of them ruled over by the Israeli state. They are systematically and intentionally treated differently, with the Palestinians given far fewer rights and treated much more harshly on the basis of race and ethnicity. Even inside Israel, the Knesset or parliament passed a measure in 2018 declaring that sovereignty solely resides in the Jewish people, formally making Israeli citizens of Palestinian extraction, over 20% of the population, second class citizens. What then of the militarily Occupied Palestinians in the Territories, who labor under martial law administered by Israeli officers?

That Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International both came to the conclusion in 2021 – 2022 that Israel is practicing Apartheid as defined in the UN Apartheid Convention and the 2002 Rome Statute that established the International Criminal Court at the Hague, helped convince Lynk that the term was inescapable.

The newsletter of the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights quoted Lynk’s final conclusions after six years of visiting the area and reporting on it,

“There is today in the Palestinian territory occupied by Israel since 1967 a deeply discriminatory dual legal and political system that privileges the 700,000 Israeli Jewish settlers living in the 300 illegal Israeli settlements in East Jerusalem and the West Bank. Living in the same geographic space, but separated by walls, checkpoints, roads and an entrenched military presence, are more than three million Palestinians, who are without rights, living under an oppressive rule of institutional discrimination and without a path to a genuine Palestinian state that the world has long promised is their right. Another two million Palestinians live in Gaza, described regularly as an ‘open-air prison’, without adequate access to power, water or health, with a collapsing economy and with no ability to freely travel to the rest of Palestine or the outside world.”

In his Dawnmena piece, Lynk says that he was pushed to conclude that this situation is Apartheid, and was pushed to so call it, by two main considerations. One was the steadfast refusal of the United States and Europe to hold Israel to account for its systematic violations of international human rights law. You can’t have a rules-based international order, he says, if a UN member can deliberately and relentlessly flout the UN Charter and the organization’s main human rights instruments and treaties without suffering any penalty. The US almost always uses its veto to protect Israel from the sort of sanctions imposed on other violators, such as Iraq and Iran.

The second consideration, he said, was that in the past year the major human rights organizations have concluded that there is no other way to describe Israeli policies toward the Palestinians but Apartheid. Lynk wrote,

“Albert Camus once wrote that calling things by their wrong name only adds to the misfortune of the world. I came to accept that international humanitarian law could no longer adequately capture the new legal and political reality in the occupied Palestinian territory. The Israeli occupation—which, under international law, is required to be temporary and short-term—had become indistinguishable from annexation and apartheid. When I became Special Rapporteur in 2016, there were 400,000 Israeli settlers in the West Bank, and 220,000 in East Jerusalem. By 2022, the settler population stood at 485,000 and 230,000, respectively. These settlers live outside of Israel’s recognized international borders, yet enjoy full Israeli citizenship rights in Jewish-only communities, while the 5 million Palestinians among them live under either Israeli military law or under a truncated form of precarious residency rights.”

I wouldn’t have quoted Camus on this point, since the French existentialist was Algerian-born and desperately wanted to keep 11 million Algerians under French Occupation in the 1950s, differing from Sartre in this regard (not that Sartre was sympathetic to the Palestinians).

Why not quote a Palestinian poet, the late Mahmoud Darwish, on this issue, from one of his last letters written only three months before his death to a literary festival he could not attend because of his ill health?

“We are now in the sixtieth year of the Nakba. There are those who dance now on our graves, and they consider us their feast. But the Nakba is not a memory; it is a continuous uprooting that makes Palestinians more worried about their existence. The Nakba continues because the occupation continues. Continuing occupation means the continuation of the war. This permanent war waged by Israel against us is not a war to defend its existence; it is a war over our existence. The conflict is not, therefore, a conflict between two existences, as the Israeli discourse promotes . . . You are here, dear friends, to see the facts for how they are. Yesterday we celebrated together the end of apartheid in South Africa. And here you see it thriving . . . in all of its power.”