State TV found to broadcast scores of coerced confessions
DUBAI, United Arab Emirates — Iranian state television has broadcast the suspected coerced confessions of at least 355 people over the past decade as a means to both suppress dissent and frighten activists in the Islamic Republic on behalf of security services, according to a report released Thursday.
The study published by Justice for Iran and the International Federation for Human Rights outlined cases of prisoners being coached into reading from white boards, with state television correspondents ordering them to repeat the lines while smiling.
Others recounted being beaten, threatened with sexual violence and having their loved ones used against them to extract false testimonies later aired on news bulletins, magazinestyle shows and programs masquerading as documentaries, the report said.
The number of those filmed likely is even higher as some say their coerced confessions have yet to air, while others may not have been immediately accessible to researchers, said Mohammad Nayyeri, codirector of Justice for Iran.
“They always live with that fear of when it’s going to happen,“Nayyeri said. “So that fear itself in those cases is not less than the fear and the anguish and pain of those whose confessions have been broadcast.”
Emails sent to Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting, the state television and radio firm, could not be delivered. Iran’s mission to the United Nations did not respond to a request for comment.
Under Iranian law, only the state can own and operate television and radio stations. Satellite dishes, though prevalent across Tehran, remain illegal. YouTube and other Western video streaming services are blocked. That leaves many watching IRIB across its multiple national and provincial stations.
While state TV channels remain a major force across much of the Mideast, IRIB particularly appears influenced by state security agencies like Iran’s Intelligence Ministry, its military and the intelligence arm of the country’s paramilitary Revolutionary Guard.
“IRIB operates as a media hub that links a vast network of security, intelligence, military and judicial organizations,“the report said.
The use of televised, coerced confessions dates to the chaotic years immediately after Iran’s 1979 Islamic Revolution. State television aired confessions by suspected members of communist groups, insurgents and others.
There have been a number of famous cases of aired coerced confessions, like that of Newsweek correspondent Maziar Bahari, who got British regulators to revoke the license for Iranian state television Englishlanguage arm Press TV over airing his.