^{Category: International Human Rights}

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While a prominent Morocco-based Islamic cultural organization celebrated International Women's Day on March 8th by endorsing women's rights, police in Iran fell back on their time-honored holiday tradition of violence and oppression. Human Rights Watch reports:

Iranian police and plainclothes agents yesterday charged a peaceful assembly of women’s rights activists in Tehran and beat hundreds of women and men who had gathered to commemorate International Women’s Day, Human Rights Watch said today ...

“This was a completely peaceful gathering with no political overtones or slogans,” one participant told Human Rights Watch. “We just held up signs in solidarity with the international women’s rights movement.”

Within minutes, after agents photographed and videotaped the gathering, the police told the crowd to disperse. In response, the participants staged a sit-in and started to sing the anthem of the women’s rights movement, one participant told Human Rights Watch.

The security forces then dumped cans of garbage on the heads of women who were seated before charging into the group and beating them with batons to compel them to leave the park ...

“As we started to run away and seek shelter, they followed us and continued to beat us. I was beaten several times on my arm, below the waist, and on my wrist,” an activist said ...

Among those present at the gathering was Simin Behbahani, a renowned Iranian poet. According to an eyewitness, “Behbahani was beaten with a baton, and when people protested that she is in her 70s and she can barely see, the security officer kicked her several times and continued to hit her with his baton.”

There will be no investigation, simply because there never is any investigation of this sort of thing in Iran. This is exactly what Iranian police are trained, and expected, to do.