A/HRC/22/48 I. Introduction 1. The present report is submitted pursuant to General Assembly resolution 67/182, which requested the Secretary-General to report to the General Assembly at its sixty-eighth session and to submit an interim report to the Human Rights Council at its twenty-second session. The present report provides an update to the Secretary-General’s last report to the General Assembly (A/67/327) on the human rights situation in the Islamic Republic of Iran and provides information on the progress made in the implementation of resolution 67/182. While the report focuses on the concerns identified in the General Assembly resolution, it also highlights issues impacting on economic, social and cultural rights. 2. Owing to the difficulty of collecting independent data on the human rights situation in the Islamic Republic of Iran, the report draws further upon observations made by treaty monitoring bodies, the special procedures of the Human Rights Council, United Nations agencies and international non-governmental organizations. It also refers to information from official State media. 3. Since the last report of the Secretary-General to the General Assembly (A/67/327), human rights violations have continued, with an intensified crackdown on journalists, human rights defenders and women’s rights activists. The two main opposition leaders have remained under house arrest since February 2011. Concerns about torture, amputations, flogging, increased application of the death penalty (including in public and for political prisoners), arbitrary detention and unfair trials, continue to be raised by United Nations human rights mechanisms. Freedom of expression and assembly remained curtailed, with further erosion of space for political activities. Discrimination against minority groups persisted, in some cases amounting to persecution. 4. The Secretary-General visited Tehran from 29 to 31 August 2012 to participate in the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) Summit. He also met with the Supreme Leader, the President and other senior Government representatives and discussed a range of human rights issues, including the death penalty, freedom of expression and association, and individual cases of concern. The Secretary-General encouraged the Government of the Islamic Republic of Iran to cooperate fully with international human rights mechanisms, in particular by inviting the Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Islamic Republic of Iran. II. Thematic issues A. Torture and cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment, including flogging and amputations 5. Article 38 of the Constitution of the Islamic Republic of Iran explicitly forbids the use of all forms of torture for the purpose of extracting confessions or acquiring information. There are also provisions in the Penal Code and Code on Citizen’s Rights that provide for acts of torture to be punished. On 27 November 2012, Mohammad Javad Larijani, Secretary General of the High Council for Human Rights in the Islamic Republic of Iran stressed that torture is considered to be haram (religiously forbidden) and that the judiciary was firmly determined to deal with cases involving allegations of torture. 1 1 See http://en.humanrights-iran.ir/news-19983.aspx. 3