The vice president for legal affairs described the imposition of sanctions by world powers, including the United States, on other nations as an example of blatant human rights violation.
Elham Aminzadeh made a reference to a recent report about torturing detainees by the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) after the Sept. 11 attacks in New York and said, “Some states criticize other countries for human rights violations, nevertheless, they themselves have a poor record in this area,” Fars news agency reported. The Senate Intelligence Committee’s five-year review of 6.3 million pages of CIA documents concluded last week that the intelligence agency failed to disrupt a single plot despite torturing al Qaeda members and other captives in secret facilities worldwide between 2002 and 2006, when George W. Bush was president.
The CIA interrogation program was devised by two agency contractors to squeeze information from suspects after the Sept. 11 attacks. The interrogations took place in countries that included Afghanistan, Poland and Romania, Reuters reported.
Aminzadeh, who was speaking at a conference in Tehran on the negative impacts of economic and financial sanctions on human rights, said, “Human rights should be viewed in a uniform and impartial manner globally, which means that other nations should not be punished purely based on a western definition of human rights.” Senior judiciary official Mohammad Javad Larijani also gave a speech at the conference, in which he said international sanctions including anti-Iran sanctions by the United Nations are the result of flaws in the UN mechanisms and processes that allow “some countries to impose restrictions on other nations under the banner of the UN in order to achieve their own objectives,” ISNA reported.
