Green Movement News

TEHRAN, July 6 -- Opposition leader Mir Hossein Mousavi, appearing in public for the first time in nearly three weeks, vowed Monday that protests against the disputed reelection of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad "will not end" and predicted that the new government would face problems in the future because it lacks legitimacy.

CAIRO — Iranian leaders say they have obtained confessions from top reformist officials that they plotted to bring down the government with a “velvet” revolution. Such confessions, almost always extracted under duress, are part of an effort to recast the civil unrest set off by Iran’s disputed presidential election as a conspiracy orchestrated by foreign nations, human rights groups say.

Iran's endogenous civil-rights movement needs international solidarity, not political meddling. Academics, universities and non-governmental organizations can help. "Bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb-bomb, Iran," sang John McCain to the tune of The Beach Boys' Barbara Ann at a US presidential campaign event in 2007. McCain, a Republican senator for Arizona, later insisted he was joking. Yet the spur-of-the-moment instinct behind the 'joke' sums up aptly the tendency of some politicians both in the West and in Iran to demonize each other's peoples as a faceless enemy.

UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) - Iranian Nobel Peace Prize recipient Shirin Ebadi called on U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon on Thursday to appoint a personal envoy to investigate human rights abuses in Iran. In a letter also signed by the rights groups International Federation for Human Rights and the Iranian League for the Defense of Human Rights, Ebadi asked Ban to appoint the envoy to look into abuses in Iran following June's disputed presidential election.

Afshin, a shopkeeper from south-west Iran, alleges that one of his friends was beaten and repeatedly raped after being arrested at an opposition rally after last month's disputed election. He gave this account to Esfandiar Poorgiv, a journalist and academic. It is published here as part of the Guardian's project to trace those killed and detained during the unrest. The Guardian has been unable to independently verify the account