* The European Union's approach to Tehran is to engage in "dialogue," even as political detainees are being tortured in the presence of judges, held for weeks in absolute solitary confinement, and denied basic due process rights.

The European Union's human rights delegation to Iran began its two-day session with Iranian officials in Tehran on Monday, June 14. The Regime's official news agency, ISNA, speaks of the "fourth roundtable talks on human rights between the Islamic Republic and the EU," inaugurated, according to the agency, in an atmosphere of "friendship and mutual understanding" and far from "presumptions built by masters of power or forced by political pressures."

Before the delegation left for Iran, the Human Rights Watch Organization warned EU officials that they, "should take a much stronger approach in the upcoming E.U.-Iran human rights dialogue than they have in previous meetings with the Iranian government."

In fact, the organization had on June 7 published a priceless 73-page report entitled "Like the Dead in Their Coffins: Torture, Detention, and the Crushing of Dissent in Iran" which gave unprecedented details on how political detainees have been tortured in the presence of judges, held for weeks in absolute solitary confinement, and denied basic due process rights.

 http://www.iranvajahan.net/cgi-bin/news.pl?l=en&y=2004&m=06&d=07&a=9

In recent weeks, hundreds of student protesters have been summoned to court around the country or sent to university disciplinary committees for punishment. Last month, a number of political detainees on medical leave received harsh prison sentences for articles they had published.

Human Rights Watch's Middle East and North Africa executive director, Sarah Leah Whitson, urged the EU to "publicly condemn the crackdown currently underway."

The organization asked the EU to make further human rights negotiations with Iran contingent on certain steps, such as: releasing all political prisoners currently held for legal exercise of their right to free expression, creating specific enforcement mechanisms for its anti-torture laws, conducting a thorough investigation of its secret prisons granting full access to international observers, and providing for independent investigation of judges and prosecutors who violate local and international laws.

The HRW report covers mostly the so-called Khatami era (after President Mohammad Khatami). The report shows quite flawlessly that the two-term presidency of Khatami only worsened the human rights situation in Iran. Iran's record of human rights during the '80s and the '90s is well-known and documented, but especially since Khatami's second term, beginning in 2001, the degrading situation shows much more than mere rights abuses. This was supposed to be a period of "openness," one of "reform." Now with such a rights record, and with the recent parliamentary elections -- with virtually all candidates not belonging to the opposite faction, namely the Supreme leader Ali Khamenei's faction, put out of the game -- one can easily deduce that no reform will ever be in sight with the current regime in place.

Then the big question would be the use of "human rights negotiations" with such a regime. EU's policy of "dialogue" with the mullahs has always been criticized, justly so, because of the lack of a minimum of sincerity on the part of the mullahs. Because of this lack of sincerity, the whole outcome is an appeasement of the regime's most notorious factions.

The EU should insist on sending delegations to visit Iranian jails, secret torture chambers, and the indefinite array of solitary confinement cells in the notorious Evin prison of Tehran, not sit down at a roundtable negotiation with those who are responsible for all this mayhem. "Human Rights negotiations" with the regime is shivering enough, but going to Tehran to do this is ridiculous to the Iranian people. It is not without reason that the mullahs say brazenly that "since two years that this dialogue goes on, the EU has not sponsored any resolutions on rights violations in Iran in the UN Human Rights' Commission, and has even recently prevented such a resolution from being issued after opponents of the Islamic Republic instigated that." (Mehr news agency, June 9, 2004). What would those victims in solitary cells, or in torture chambers, or in unknown safe houses-turned-into-prisons say, when they hear about such "friendly atmospheres?"

More dangerous than neglecting rights abuses is letting such abuses be used by those who undertake them as bargaining chips.

Nooredin Abedian is an Iranian engineer based in Germany, and a former lecturer at Tehran University. He writes from time to time on Iranian issues and politics.