Submission to the UN Universal Periodic Review 34th Session of the UPR Working Group- 2019

6Rang’s submission focuses on several key issues regarding LGBT rights in Iran and highlights the failure of Iranian authorities to undertake appropriate measures and implement the recommendations from Iran’s previous UPR reviews in 2010 and 2014. Islamic Republic of Iran (IRI) remains an extremely hostile and dangerous environment for LGBT individuals and activists. The IRI’s penal laws continue to impose criminal sanctions and maintain the death penalty and corporal punishment for consensual same-sex sexual conducts and homosexual expressions.

This submission raises specific concerns about continuing patterns of serious human rights abuses against LGBT people in health-care settings in Iran, which is focused on reparative therapies including electroshock therapy, sterilization and sex reassignment surgeries, many of which are cruel, inhumane and humiliating and amount to‏ torture. 6Rang notes with deep concern that such reparative therapies on gays and lesbians as well as the number of private and semi-governmental institutions and clinics treating homosexuals have been continually increasing.

6Rang also notes that, IRI officials regularly arbitrarily arrest, harass and persecute members of the LGBT community and gender rights activists and continue to suppress any form of civil activism and defense of human rights that is concerned with gender identity and sexual orientation. High-ranking IRI officials also promote and engage in hate speech, abusive and derogatory rhetoric and incitement to violence against LGBT people.

To read the full submission, please click here