Andrew Southcott (Boothby, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

There are 300,000 to 350,000 followers of the Baha’i faith in Iran, and they face systematic discrimination from the government of the Islamic Republic of Iran. Members of the Baha’i faith are denied admission to colleges and universities, and they have been dismissed midstream from university. In 1998 college classes were raided and equipment was confiscated. Baha’i holy sites have been destroyed in Iran. Over 200 members of the Baha’i faith have been killed since the early 1980s and over 1,000 have been imprisoned. There have recently appeared in Kayhan, the official Tehran newspaper, defamatory and inflammatory articles about the Baha’i faith. What is particularly disturbing is that this was done before, in previous government campaigns of persecution in 1955 and 1979. Respected Middle East scholar and commentator Bernard Lewis has demonstrated that the persecution of religious minorities was never a part of classical Islam—that in fact Christian communities and other religious minorities existed peacefully within the original caliphate of Islam in the seventh and eight centuries and so on.

Like the previous speaker, I was able to meet with members of the local Baha’i community in my electorate last month. They alerted me to the recent report by the UN Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Religion or Belief. That report of 20 March outlines that a confidential letter was sent on 29 October 2005 by the Chairman of the Command Headquarters of the Armed Forces of Iran to government agencies asking them to identify persons of the Baha’i faith and to monitor their activities. To take some excerpts from the statement issued by the special rapporteur, she said that she has:

... long been concerned by the systematic discrimination against members of the Baha’i community.

And that:

... the situation with regard to religious minorities is, in fact, deteriorating.

She calls on the government of Iran to refrain from categorising individuals according to their religion and to ensure that members of all religious minorities are free to hold and practise their religious beliefs. This recent report of the UN special rapporteur highlights some serious concerns that the registering and monitoring of members of the Baha’i faith could potentially be presaging some government campaign of persecution.

The Australian government has long been concerned about the human rights situation in Iran. On 2 November last year I was able to give a statement on human rights situations on behalf of Australia to the third committee of the United Nations. Along with concern about the human rights situation in Burma, North Korea and Zimbabwe, the statement said:

Australia remains concerned by the human rights situation in Iran, including ongoing suppression of freedom of expression, discrimination against women and minority groups (including the Baha’i community, Christians, Jews, and Kurds) and deficiencies in the administration of justice ... We urge Iran to engage further with the United Nations and the international community on human rights issues.

This was part of a United Nations General Assembly resolution on human rights. Since then, the Australian government has raised this issue with the Iranian Ambassador to Australia and our embassy in Tehran has made representations directly to the Iranian government.

President Ahmadinejad’s 2005 statement calling for Israel to be ‘wiped off the map’, Iran’s pursuit of uranium enrichment at Natanz and its persecution of religious minorities, including the Baha’i, are all deeply troubling and of great concern. Australia needs to continue to condemn all of these actions. We need to increase the international pressure on Iran to be a responsible international citizen. I commend the member for Throsby for moving this motion and having it debated in a bipartisan way. Motions like this are very important for raising international awareness of Iranian actions and, hopefully, curbing Iran’s human rights violations.

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