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A United Nations report has revealed multiple violations of the human rights of LGBT children in Iran. The report, authored by Special Rapporteur Javaid Rehman, Professor of International Human Rights Law and Muslim Constitutionalism at Brunel University, suggests that the Iranian regime routinely subjects LGBT minors to electric shocks, hormone treatments and psychoactive drugs as a “cure” for their sexuality.

In his report, Mr Rehman comments, “These practices amount to torture and cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment, and violate the State’s obligations under the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the Convention on the Rights of the Child.”

The Islamic Republic of Iran is extremely hostile to its LGBT citizens with imprisonment, corporal punishment and execution commonplace. It is estimated that thousands of LGBT people, mostly gay men, have been executed in the country since the Islamic revolution of 1979. 

In 2019, a reporter from German newspaper Bild asked Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammed Javad Zarif : “Why are homosexuals executed in Iran because of their sexual orientation?”

Mr Zarif responded: “Our society has moral principles. And we live according to these principles. These are moral principles concerning the behaviour of people in general. And that means that the law is respected and the law is obeyed.”

Iran is not alone in its hostility to and mistreatment of its LGBT citizens: every country in the Middle-East, with the exception of Israel where LGBT equality laws are comparable to those in the UK and western Europe, punishes same sex activity with sentences ranging from imprisonment to death.

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