'Journalists should be deprived of citizen rights'

GVF -- Iran’s Ministry for Culture and Islamic Guidance has said that changes should be made to Iran’s press law, so that instead of banning publications, “lawbreaking” journalists themselves should be confronted.

Mohammad Ali Ramin, the media advisor to the Iranian culture minister told Iranian TV on Monday that in the United States and some European countries, publications are not banned, but instead “the lawbreakers are banned from working and their rights as citizens are taken away.”

Mr Ramin’s comments came following the banning of the reformist newspaper Etemad and the revoking of the weekly magazine Irandokht’s licence. He also claimed that the current press laws had limited the ministry’s ability to stifle the press and expressed hope that with the soon-to-be-passed regulation by the Iranian Parliament, it would be possible to deal with “lawbreakers and criminals” themselves instead of only closing down the publication involved!

Ramin described the current situation of the press in Iran as “chaotic” and said that authorities are faced with a “small number of lawbreakers” and “seekers of anarchy.” He also expressed his dismay at the fact that journalists were being “temporarily released on bail” and then “in the most obscene way, break the laws with a group of other people and oversee two publications again.”

Following the rigged presidential election of June 2009, the government launched a massive campaign of arrest against journalists, photographers and numerous members of the press.

Following the closure of Etemad newspaper, former vice-president Masoumeh Ebtekar stated that “talk of unity is difficult when journalists are in prison and newspapers are shut down.”

 Iran is currently by far the world’s worst jailer of journalists which is significant as a dictatorship such as China with a population of 1.2 billon has a considerably lower number of journalists in prison.