Legal framework on freedom of religion and actual application
Iran is an Islamic republic based on a theocratic constitution adopted after the Islamic Revolution that toppled the Shah in 1979. Article 12 of the constitution states that the Islamic school of Ja’fari Shi’ism is the official religion of the country. Article 13 does recognise Christians, Jews, and Zoroastrians as protected religious minorities with the right to worship freely and form religious societies: “Zoroastrian, Jewish, and Christian Iranians are the only recognized religious minorities, who, within the limits of the law, are free to perform their religious rites and ceremonies, and to act according to their own canon in matters of personal affairs and religious education”. Two seats in the Iranian parliament (Majlis) are reserved for Armenian Christians – the country’s largest Christian minority (300,000), and one each for Assyrian Christians, Jews and Zoroastrians.
The state is under the authority of the Shi‘a clergy, who rule through the Rahbar-e mo'azzam-e irān, the Supreme Leader of Iran, nominated for life by the Assembly of Experts – 86 theologians elected by the people for a term of eight years. The Rahbar presides over the Guardian Council of the Constitution, a 12-member body (six appointed by the leader and six by the judiciary). The council exercises control over the laws and governing bodies of the state, including the presidency, whose office holder is elected by direct vote for a four-year term, renewable once.
In Iran, one of the principal obstacles to full religious freedom is “apostasy”. The government considers any citizen who cannot prove that they or their family was Christian prior to 1979 to be Muslim. Conversion from Islam to another religion is not explicitly banned in the constitution or the penal code, but it is difficult because of the country’s powerful Islamic traditions and the legal system founded on Shari‘a (Islamic law). For all cases not mentioned explicitly in the constitution, judges have the option, under Article 167, to refer to “authoritative Islamic sources or authentic fatawa [fatwas]”. In cases of apostasy, sentences are based on Shari‘a and fatwas and can be punished with the death penalty. Christian converts are not allowed to legally register themselves as Christians and are not entitled to the same rights as recognised members of Christian communities.
The country’s penal code has provisions against blasphemy. Article 513 states: “[a]nyone who insults the sacred values of Islam or any of the Great Prophets or [twelve] Shi’ite Imams or the Holy Fatima, if considered as Saab ul-nabi [as having committed actions warranting the hadd punishment for insulting the Prophet], shall be executed; otherwise, they shall be sentenced to one to five years’ imprisonment.” Article 514 states, “[a]nyone who, by any means, insults Imam Khomeini, the founder of the Islamic Republic, and/or the Supreme Leader shall be sentenced to six months to two years’ imprisonment.”
In February 2021, the Iranian state amended Articles 499 and 500 of the penal code widened the scope for prosecuting Christians, especially converts from Islam to Christianity.
During the period under review, the Iranian government continued to enforce Islamic dress codes whereby women of all religious groups are expected to cover their hair in public with a hijab.
Incidents and developments
In November 2020, UN Special Rapporteurs estimated the number of Iranian Christians at 250,000, though other sources place the total at between 500,000 and 800,000 – nevertheless a tiny minority. The majority are ethnic Assyrian and Armenian Christians, while the rest are converts from Islam, with the majority of these being followers of Protestant Churches, including house churches.
Members of recognized communities like Zoroastrians, Jews and Christians of traditional Churches can worship within stringent limits. Any evangelisation activity remains illegal. Christian converts from Islam remain one of the most targeted groups in the country viewed with deep suspicion perceived as an attempt by Western countries to undermine Islam and the Islamic regime of Iran. Iranian house churches have spread “because of church closures and a lack of state licences to build new churches, or because access to official churches has been restricted to Armenian and Assyrian Christians. The houses are changed regularly to avoid detection”.
On 11 November 2020, a formal enquiry by six senior UN rights experts including Ahmed Shaheed, the special rapporteur on freedom of religion or belief, and Javaid Rehman, special rapporteur on human rights in Iran, was submitted to the government of Iran. The letter addressed the “reported persecution of members of the Christian minority in Iran, including converts from Islam, as well as the detention of dozens of Christians, most of whom have been convicted for exercising their right to freely observe and worship their religion”.
In January 2021, a response of the Iranian government to the November 2020 letter from the UN Special Rapporteurs called house-churches “enemy groups” with “anti-security purposes”; declared that “nobody is prosecuted on religious grounds” and; that the reported persecuted members of the Christian minority in Iran, including converts from Islam, were in fact “communicating with evangelical Zionism with a view to enmity and confrontation with the Islamic Establishment and subversive act against it through organized cults and holding illegal and secret meetings to deceive citizens and exploit the deceived persons, particularly children”.
A 2021 Article 18 annual report, a London-based non-profit defending religious freedom in Iran, documented “more than 120 incidents of arrest, detention, or imprisonment of Christian converts, Iran's largest Christian community”. Of significance in the clampdown on Persian-speaking Christians was the participation of Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), “responsible for 12 of the 38 documented incidents of arrests of Christians or raids on their homes or house churches”.
On 19 February 2021, Iran’s president Hassan Rouhani signed into law Articles 499 and 500, two controversial amendments to the Penal Code which are “a full-on attack on the right to freedom of religion and belief”. Article 499’s amendment “provides for up to five years’ imprisonment for ‘anyone who insults Iranian ethnicities or divine religions or Islamic schools of thought recognised under the Constitution with the intent to cause violence or tensions in the society or with the knowledge that such [consequences] will follow’”. The amended Article 500 “provides for up to five years’ imprisonment for ‘any deviant educational or proselytising activity’ by members of so-called ‘sects’ that ‘contradicts or interferes with the sacred law of Islam’ through ‘mind-control methods and psychological indoctrination’ or ‘making false claims or lying in religious and Islamic spheres, such as claiming divinity’”.
In February, 11 Christian families were summoned by authorities, interrogated, and then warned to stop their house church meetings. They were also warned not to visit each other at home, even for social gatherings.
In April, reports indicated that Iranian authorities were banning Baha’is from burying family members at the Golestan Javid Cemetery near Tehran, which they had used for decades. Instead, the government insisted they be buried between existing graves within the cemetery, or at the nearby Khavaran mass grave site for victims of the 1988 prison massacres. The Baha’i community strongly objected as they saw this as a desecration of the Khavaran mass grave site. Later the government reversed the edict.
In April, four Christian converts Hojjat Lotfi Khalaf, Esmaeil Narimanpour, Alireza Varak-Shah and Mohammad Ali Torabi were arrested in the city of Dezful. In August they were charged with “propaganda against the Islamic Republic” on the grounds of their membership in a house church.
On 22 April, two men, Yusef Mehrdad and Seyyed Sadrollah Fazeli Zare, were sentenced by a Criminal Court in central Iran for “insulting the Prophet Muhammad” and “blasphemy”, which carries the death penalty. The exact cause of the charges was not made clear. The ruling was upheld by the Supreme Court of Iran in August 2021. According to Iran Human Rights Monitor, “The Iranian regime open-handedly uses the death penalty as a form of punishment. In many cases, the religious and ethnic minorities and political dissidents are targets of the death penalty in a discriminatory manner.”
In June, the visa of seventy-five-year-old Sr Giuseppina Berti, an Italian missionary sister of the Daughters of Charity of St. Vincent de Paul, was not renewed. Sr Giuseppina had worked for 26 years in service of leprosy patients in Tabriz.
In June, three Christian converts were sentenced to the maximum penalty of five years in prison on the charge of “propaganda against the Islamic regime”. In August a court reduced the sentence of Amin Khaki, Milad Goudarzi and Alireza Nourmohammadi to three years.
In June, although their appeal for retrial was rejected, Christian converts Homayoun Zhaveh and his wife Sara Ahmadi were nevertheless given a 30-day reprieve from jail. In November 2020, they had been sentenced to two and 11 years respectively in prison for belonging to a house-church. Sara’s sentence was reduced to eight years in December 2020.
In June, Nasser Navard Gol-Tapeh’s parole for early release was rejected without explanation. Gol-Tapeh, a Christian, was sentenced to 10 years in prison because of his participation in a house-church, which was considered a threat to national security.
A June report published by the Norwegian Landinfo, concerning the criminal prosecution of Christian converts over the past two to three years, noted: “Some of those who have received the most severe punishments (from 2-10 years in prison), have been convicted of leading/organizing house churches. Relations with missionary communities abroad also constitute a risk, as the spread of the Christian faith is considered to be the work of enemy states. Furthermore, several convicts are members of the targeted Church of Iran network”.
In September, Iranian Christians Amin Khaki, Milad Goudarzi and Alireza Nourmohammadi had prison sentences reduced to three years by the 12th Chamber of the Court of Appeal of the Revolutionary Tribunal in Karaj. The three members of the Church of Iran were first sentenced to five years in prison in June for “engaging in propaganda against the Islamic regime” and also stood trial for engaging in “sectarian activities”.
In November, Iran’s Supreme Court ruled that nine Christian converts involved in house-churches should not have been convicted on charges of acting against state security prosecutable under articles 498 and 499 of the penal code. The highest court of the country stated that “merely preaching Christianity, and promoting the ‘Evangelical Zionist sect’, both of which apparently means propagating Christianity through family gatherings [house-churches] is not a manifestation of gathering and collusion to disrupt the security of the country, whether internally or externally.” In February 2022, a Teheran court acquitted the nine Christian converts. Initial optimism though dissipated after two of the acquitted were faced with new charges of propaganda and the reimprisonment of one based on charges he had been acquitted of earlier.
In December 2021, 13 farmland plots in the village of Kata in Kohgiluyeh and Boyer-Ahmad Province were appropriated. These incidents are examples of an increasing number of confiscations of Baha’i owned property.
2022
In January 2022, two Christian converts, Habib Heydari and Sasan Khosravi, were released from prison. They had concluded their one-year prison sentences for belonging to a house-church.
In January, Baha’i student Kasra Shoai was not allowed to study in the Zahedan University of Applied Sciences due to his faith.
In January, organizations funded by the State held a workshop designed to create propaganda directed against the Baha’i community.
In January, Pastor Matthias (Abdulreza Ali) Hagnejad was re-arrested two weeks after being released from prison pending a review of his five-year sentence. He was released in late December 2021 after nearly three years in prison on charges of “endangering state security” and “promoting Zionist Christianity”. Eight other Church of Iran members were arrested at the same time.
In January, eight Christian converts were summoned by the authorities and pressured to leave their faith by forcing them to attend “ideological re-education” sessions.
In February, Christian convert Sakineh Behjati was summoned by the Public Prosecutor and Revolutionary Court in District 12 of Tehran to serve her prison term of two years on the charge of advertising against the State and acting against national security.
In February 2022, two Christian converts in Tehran had their request for a retrial rejected after they were given custodial sentences for practising their faith Hadi Rahimi and Sakineh Behjati were summoned to begin their four-and two-year sentences on 16th February after Branch 9 of the Supreme Court rejected their appeal. The pair were sentenced to prison by Branch 26 of the Tehran Revolutionary Court in August 2020 on the official charge of “membership of groups seeking to disrupt the national security.” It is highly likely that the pair were targeted because they attended a house church.
In February a group of Christian converts from the western city of Dezful who had been exonerated of any crimes in November 2021, were forced to undertake “re-education” classes – 10 compulsory sessions with Islamic clerics – in an attempt to revert them to Islam.
In March, Sunni prisoner Hamzeh Darvish was sentenced to 25 months for “offensive statements against the Supreme Leader of Iran” and “propaganda against the regime”. This sentence was added to an existing 15-year prison term that Darvish had started serving that same year.
In March, nine Christian converts were acquitted by an appeals court after previously being charged with “acting against national security” and “promoting Zionist Christianity”. Judges Seyed Ali Asghar Kamali and Akbar Johari said there was “insufficient evidence” to show that the accused had acted against state security and argued that Christians are taught to live in “obedience, submission and support of the authorities”.
In April, authorities, with the participation of members of the Revolutionary Guards, destroyed a Sunni mosque in Zahedan.
In April, Iranian Pastor Yousef Nadarkhani, a convert from Islam to Christianity, was temporarily released from Evin Prison in Teheran where the pastor had served a six-year sentence.
In April, parts of a Bahai cemetery in Hamedan was destroyed by unidentified individuals. According to the Bahai Iran Press Watch, “In recent years, other Baha’i cemeteries in various cities, including Qorveh, Sanandaj, Kerman, Shiraz and Urmia have been demolished.”
In May, a Tehran Revolutionary Court sentenced Iranian-Armenian Christian Anooshavan Avedian to 10 years in prison and 10 years of “deprivation of social rights” for teaching Christians in his home. Three Christians were sentenced to prison, or exile, after being accused of forming a “house church”. Christian converts Abbas Soori, 45, and Maryam Mohammadi, 46, were also deprived of social rights for 10 years and fined. They were also banned from leaving Iran.
In May, seven Christians were sentenced to prison, amongst them Iranian-Armenian pastor Joseph Shahbazian who was condemned to ten years in prison charged with acting against national security. Six more Christian converts were sentenced to between one and six years in prison for their leadership or membership in house-churches.
In June, the Revolutionary Court of Shiraz issued prison sentences for 26 Baha’is amounting to a total of 85 years in prison on charges of “assembly and collusion to disrupt the internal and external national security.” During the period under review, there were numerous reports of Baha’is being arrested because of their faith.
In July, three Christian converts already facing five years in prison for “engaging in propaganda and education of deviant beliefs contrary to the holy Shari‘a” were informed they were to return to court to face a second trial on identical charges. An appeal court had upheld the sentence in June.
In August, the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) claimed that the Iranian government was actively inciting “derogatory public opinion” against Christianity and other faiths by using Iranian media outlets to spread religious propaganda. The bipartisan federal advisory committee stated that Iranian state propaganda against Christian converts is often disguised as anti-Zionism, and Christian converts are regularly referred to as members of a “Zionist” network.
In August, security and intelligence agents “demolished at least eight homes belonging to Baha’i families in Mazandaran Province and confiscated 20 hectares of their land. Those who tried to challenge the operations were arrested.”
A 22 August statement by the UN Experts for Special Procedures of the Human Rights Council declared: “We are deeply concerned at the increasing arbitrary arrests, and on occasions, enforced disappearances of members of the Baha’i faith and the destruction or confiscation of their properties, in what bears all the signs of a policy of systematic persecution”. The UN experts indicated that “over 1000 Baha’is were awaiting imprisonment, following their initial arrests and hearings” and that since July 2022, “security agents have raided the homes of over 35 Baha’is in various cities, and arrested several individuals across the country”. According to the UN report, “the acts were not isolated but formed part of a broader policy to target any dissenting belief or religious practice, including Christian converts, Gonabadi dervishes and atheists.
On 16 September, nationwide protests erupted after a 22-year-old woman Mahsa Amini died in morality police custody after being beaten for allegedly failing to adhere to hijab (headscarf) rules. The main slogan of the protesters was “Women, Life, Freedom”, both a call for equality and against religious fundamentalism. Counter demonstrations also took place with participants chanting slogans such as, “offenders of the Qur’an must be executed”.
At first mainly women took to the streets to protest the mandate to wear headscarves, often by publicly burning them. Subsequently, however, many men joined the protest which changed from standing against the compulsory hijab to a movement against the entire institution of the Islamic Republic.
At the time of writing, security forces “have killed at least 448 people including 60 children and 29 women, and made up to 17,000 arrests”. According to a report by the Guardian, the “majority of casualties” appear to derive from the northwest where authorities are clamping down on renewed violence from a long-standing Kurdish separatist campaign, and from resumed hostilities in the southeast’s Baluch region where Sunni armed groups rebel against discrimination by the Shia state.
On 24 November, following calls from the UN human rights chief Volker Türk, the UN Human Rights Council commissioned a fact-finding mission to investigate the protests.
On 2 December, the United States designated Iran as a Country of Particular Concern under the Religious Freedom Act.
On 4 December, Iran’s public prosecutor stated that “the morality police had been ‘suspended’, suggesting that the authorities’ policy, discernible since the beginning of the protests, of turning a blind eye to women not wearing the hijab has been made permanent”. On 25 November, according to an internal report “compiled by the regime and made public by hackers calling themselves Black Reward, 51% of Iranians want the hijab to be a matter of personal choice and 56% expect the protests to carry on”.
Prospects for freedom of religion
In the period under review, minority faith communities including Christians (especially Christian converts), the Baha’i, Sunni Muslims, and non-believers experienced discrimination and persecution. Examples of these violations included damage to their properties, physical harm and even death.
The legal situation worsened in February 2021 when President Hassan Rouhani signed amendments to articles 499 and 500 of the penal code, introducing prison sentences for those guilty of “insulting Islam” and undertaking “deviant activity” that “contradicts or interferes with the sacred law of Islam”.
Iran is again at crossroads. More than forty years after the revolution, dissatisfaction sparked by the death of Mahsa Amini has turned into rolling protests across the country calling for the abolition of the Islamic Republic. Whether the protests engulfing Iran will lead to reformist steps, or to even more oppression, remains to be seen. Consequently, prospects for freedom of religion are negative and the situation is likely to get worse.
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