TEHRAN, Nov 10: The UN’s Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Opinion and Expression, Ambeyi Ligabo, said on Monday he had asked Iran to release all dissidents, including prominent academic Hashem Aghajari.

When asked in an interview to describe the outcome of his meeting here with Mr Aghajari — condemned to death last year for questioning the right to rule of the religious establishment but now awaiting a review of his sentence — Mr Ligabo said the disabled war veteran should be immediately released on health grounds.

“You cannot take care of yourself when you are in prison. It is important that he be released to take care of himself. I have asked that he be immediately released,” he told foreign news agency reporters.

Mr Ligabo said he had made a similar demand for other prisoners he met.

“Not only Aghajari but all of them. I believe that they should be released so that they can be able to take care of themselves,” he said, referring to prisoners being held in Iran for press-related offences or having merely spoken out against the government.

Iranian authorities responded, he said, by telling him that a number of cases were under review.

The envoy, who was wrapping up a week-long fact-finding mission to Iran in preparation of a key report of the human rights situation here, said access to the people he wanted to see had largely been satisfied.

“I met the prisoners of my own choosing,” he said, explaining that the talks with them were held in the courtyard of Tehran’s Evin prison and without any officials present “so that the prisoners were free to talk to me”.

He also said a number of those he met had complained of serious mistreatment.

“Solitary confinement is bad treatment,” he explained, adding that some of the prisoners had reported being held in solitary for more than 100 days.

As for Mr Aghajari, the UN rapporteur would only say the two had held “exhaustive discussions”.

Mr Aghajari is currently Iran’s most high-profile dissident.

In a speech last year, he called for a “religious renewal” of Shiaism, espousing a major structural shake-up in Iran’s religion of state and asserting that Muslims were not “monkeys” and “should not blindly follow” religious leaders.

For powerful hardliners, those comments were seen as a frontal assault on the status of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei as supreme leader.

In November last year, a judge in the western city of Hamedan ruled that Mr Aghajari had committed blasphemy and, in line with Islamic and Iranian law, deserved to die.

But following a week of protests by students and complaints by reformist government officials, Ayatollah Khamenei stepped in and demanded the sentence be reviewed by the same hardline court in Hamedan that issued the initial verdict.

Mr Aghajari remains in jail pending the revision of the sentence.

Aides to Mr Ligabo said the Kenyan diplomat had met some of Iran’s most prominent prisoners, among them also journalist Akbar Ganji — jailed in 2000 after he alleged in a newspaper that top government officials were behind a spate of grisly murders of dissidents.

A UN source said Mr Ligabo also met Siamak Pourzand and Iraj Jamshidi. Pourzand was jailed over a year ago on accusations of spying for the United States, while Iraj Jamshidi was jailed this year after his paper carried a front page photograph of Maryam Rajavi, a leader of the banned People’s Mujahedeen opposition group.

Mr Ligabo had initially been due to visit the country in July, but Tehran postponed the trip in June at the height of protests accompanied by arrests of journalists, student leaders and dissidents. —AFP