By The Canadian Press
July 14th 2010
ADVERTISEMENT OTTAWA – Canada will take no lectures on human rights from a country that stones its citizens to death. That is Ottawa’s response to Iran’s criticism of the treatment of protesters by police at the G20 summit in Toronto.
Tehran called in Canada’s charge d’affairs on Wednesday to remind him of Canada’s international commitments to allow peaceful demonstrations, according to Iran’s state Press TV.
The story, posted on the network’s website, contains the headline “Iran slams Canada over G20 brutality.”
The diplomatic salvo, which appears to be retaliation for Canada’s repeated criticism of Iran’s human rights record, did not sit well with Ottawa.
“Canada will take no lectures on human rights from Iran,” Melissa Lantsman, a Foreign Affairs spokeswoman told The Canadian Press in an email.
“Canada has a system which affords all citizens due process of the law. This is something that Zahra Kazemi was never afforded.”
Kazemi was an Iranian-Canadian photojournalist who was beaten to death in 2003 after being arrested for photographing relatives of detainees outside the infamous Evin prison in Tehran. The Montreal woman was never formally charged with any crime.
Lantsman said Canada continues to have serious concerns about Iran’s “egregious human rights abuses”, including the violent crackdown following its disputed June 12, 2009 presidential election.
Iranian-Canadian journalist Maziar Bahari was among scores of political activists and other figures detained during the protests.
The Newsweek reporter spent nearly four months in jail but was released on a $300,000 bail and allowed to leave the country last October.
The world outcry over the death sentence by stoning for an Iranian woman convicted of adultery has become the latest issue in Iran’s fraught relationship with the international community
Stoning was widely imposed in Iran in the years following the 1979 Islamic revolution.
Amnesty International’s 2010 human rights audit cites Iran for rape and torture in prison, violations of freedom of expression, discrimination against women, and inhuman punishment such as flogging, “judicial amputation” and a Supreme Court ruling that upheld a court sentence that called for acid to be dropped in the eyes of a man who had blinded a woman.
The Iranian embassy in Ottawa did not immediately have comment.
