NEW YORK -- Iran's decision to include Tehran's prosecutor general, Saeed Mortazavi, in that country's delegation to the new United Nations Human Rights Council sends a wrong message to the international human rights community worldwide. By choosing one of country's most notorious human-rights violators, the government of Iran is showing its disregard for human rights. The choice demonstrates the need for a mechanism within the Human Rights Council to prevent a similar thing from happening in the future.
In 2000, when he was a judge, Mortazavi closed more than a dozen newspapers in one month alone. Since then, he has closed more than 80 newspapers that expressed opinions opposed to policies of the Tehran regime. Because of his vicious rulings against journalists and human-rights activists, Iran is known as the "biggest prison for journalists in the Middle East."
According to George Gordon-Lennox of the press group Reporters Without Borders, Mortazavi's role has been to "put journalists in prison."