The following is excerpted from the introduction to Omid Memarian's new book Sketches of Iran: A Glimpse from the Front Lines of Human Rights:

One day in January 2003, my friend and colleague Ali Reza Eshraghi republished an old American cartoon in the Hayat No newspaper -- a cartoon the...

Iranian leaders are masterful in manipulating the true reality on the ground in their country and obsessively addicted to taking advantage of any political opportunity to strengthen their own narrative of events. Last week's Non-Alignment Movement Summit in Tehran was one such occasion.

Trapped in two major crises --...

After a full year of efforts by Iran's human rights diplomats to discredit or ignore the mandate of Special Rapporteur on human rights in Iran Ahmed Shaheed, 22 members of the United Nations Human Rights Council voted to renew the mandate for another year on March...

Ahmed Shaheed, the UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in Iran, believes that if Tehran does not cooperate with his mandate and continues on the current path in ignoring international mechanisms to monitor the worsening human rights crisis in the country, Iran's human rights case might eventually...

I began thinking about sustained reporting on American Muslims at the very beginning of the 2008 presidential primary season. During the primaries and throughout the general election campaign, Islam, Muslim and other related terms were portrayed as slurs -- so much so that then Senator Barack Obama chose to distance...

Less than a week after the United Nations Human Rights Council appointed former Maldivian Foreign Minister Ahmed Shaheed as Special Rapporteur on Human Rights for Iran, Head of Iran's Judiciary, Sadegh Larijani, in a TV interview said, "accepting the Special Rapporteur on Human Rights is not our policy."

Many may be critical of America's human rights policies, particularly its double standards when it comes to the records of its allies in the Middle East and beyond, not to mention in Bahrain. But human rights activists and organizations have welcomed the Obama administration's presence at the Human Rights Council...

In a recent article for the Atlantic, Middle East expert Reza Aslan writes that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad may not be the hard-line president outside observers actually thinks he is. Based on unverified WikiLeaks documents and remarks by the president himself, the author concludes that Ahmadinejad...

What has been the root of the U.S'. inability to develop a sustainable policy or strategy on Iran for the last 30 years? What was not learnt from the Shah's fall in 1979 and the nature of the revolutionaries who hijacked a pro-democracy freedom movement? And what are...

SAN FRANCISCO, California, Sep 28, 2010 (IPS) -- A week after Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad told heads of state gathered for the U.N. General Assembly in New York that his government does not jail its citizens for expressing their opinions, Iran's Revolutionary Court sentenced Hossein Derakhshan, an internationally...

The release this week of Sarah Shourd, one of three Americans held for more than a year on spying charges, has been presented as an act of clemency by the Iranian regime. But by claiming the credit for freeing Shourd, the government reveals serious inconsistencies with its own account.

President...

I recall a Muslim friend of mine once asking me what I thought of the United States? I responded that the US is the kind of country which after living there for only a few years, you could grow to love it in such a way that you could sacrifice...

The summit meeting between Israeli and Palestinian leaders in Washington on 2 September 2010 testifies to the serious attention the Barack Obama administration is devoting to this enduring middle-east conflict. But even these vital negotiations are overshadowed by an issue with a potentially greater destructive capacity: the future of Iran,...

Upon his arrival to Tehran, Shahram Amiri, an Iranian junior scientist who claimed that he was kidnapped by the CIA in Saudi Arabia fourteen months ago, appeared on Iran's State TV claiming that the Americans had suggested he be swapped with the "three American spies" imprisoned...

The list of foreigners who unconditionally support the Islamic Republic of Iran is short but not unexpected: Omar Albashir of Sudan, Hassan Nasrallah of Hezbollah, Khalid Mashal of Hamas, and Hugo Chavez of Venezula might be at the top. Add to this list an unlikely duo: Flynt Leverett...

For the hard-line government in Tehran, which uses an advanced filtering system to censor their Internet, software that enables the Iranian people to circumvent their censorship and allow free Internet access would be a political nightmare. Austin Heap, a 26-year-old programmer in San Francisco says that his new software, Haystack,...

We have learned in school that "information is power." In some countries, information and spreading the truth among the people means saving lives and alleviating the suffering of those who are in pain. That's why many of activists, bloggers and journalists, who are aggressively trying to stop the tragic human...

The decision by Iranian judicial authorities to start executing political dissidents shows the courts are closer to the regime than ever and neither has any intention of compromising with protesters.

Two political prisoners have been executed and the courts have imposed nine further death sentences; the country is waiting to...

It took more than six months for the White House to "strongly condemn" the excessive use of force against the protesters in Tehran, and God knows how long it will take President Obama to conclude that compromising universal values, including human rights, at the expense of erratic negotiations with the...

The Iranian government has announced that they will try the three American citizens who strayed across an unmarked border into Iran in late July. But the question remains: how can the U.S. government help free them? And what should the families do to make this perplexing story be...