By Mostafa Naderi

On Wednesday, the Iranian regime hanged a minor, identified as Behnam Zare, whose alleged crime was committed at the age of 15. Roughly a week ago on August 19, 2008, another minor, Reza Hejazi, was hanged for an alleged crime committed at the age of 15 as well.

By: KAZEM KAZEROUNIAN
Source: Middle East Times

Iran's lobbyists in Washington are celebrating the White House announcement that U.S. Undersecretary of State William Burns will attend talks in Geneva between the EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana and Iran's negotiator Saeed Jalili.

With Iran’s nuclear intentions still under suspicion, the EU must get its act together says Birmingham peer Lord Corbett of Castle Vale.
Source: The Birmingham Post
By: Lord Corbett of Castle Vale
The European Union’s efforts to convince Iran to suspend its nuclear activities are getting nowhere. Its foreign policy chief Javier Solana visited Tehran last month to offer it a “re-vitalised” package of incentives from the world’s major powers in return for a halt to uranium enrichment.

As usual, Tehran said it would give the package serious consideration while reiterating that it would not halt uranium enrichment. As the mullahs continue to play time games with the international community, the centrifuges are spinning in the underground nuclear bunker in Natanz to produce the uranium needed to make weapons.

By Daniel Pipes
FrontPageMagazine.com
As the United Nations mandate that legitimizes the presence of U.S forces in Iraq expires on December 31, 2008, a humanitarian and strategic disaster is coming into view. The fate of about 3,500 anti-regime Iranians will be decided in the course of status-of-forces negotiations between Washington and Baghdad.

They are members of the Mujahedeen-e Khalq (MEK; it is also called the People's Mojahedin of Iran, or PMOI), the leading Iranian opposition group. Based at Camp Ashraf in central Iraq where they are recognized as "protected persons" under the Fourth Geneva Convention, they have since 2004 been under the protection of U.S. military forces. According to the Convention Against Torture of 1984, to which the U.S. government is a party, expiration of the UN mandate does not end the American obligation to continue to protect MEK members in Iraq.

By: Raymond Tanter
Source: Human Events
During the 2003 Iraq invasion, U.S. forces bombed and then disarmed members of the MEK -- Mujahedeen-e Khalq -- an Iranian opposition group that had been given refuge in Iraq. Now under U.S. protection in Camp Ashraf in Iraq, MEK members face a bleak future if U.S. forces hand over control of the base to the Iraqi government or withdraw precipitously from Iraq. The U.S. government has obligations under the Geneva Conventions and international humanitarian law refugees cannot be dispersed to a country where they would face persecution -- to protect the MEK.

By Christopher Booker
Source: The Sunday Telegraph
While our media have been preoccupied with faked pictures of rockets put out by Iran's sabre-rattling Revolutionary Guards, Tehran's equivalent of the Gestapo, there have been extraordinary developments behind the scenes, in the ongoing drama over the West's outlawing of Iran's main opposition movement, the only real hope of a democratic, secular alternative to that fundamentalist tyranny.

By: Robin Corbett, a Labour Member of the House of Lords and Chairman of the British Parliamentary Committee for Iran Freedom

Source: The Wall Street Journal
Amir Taheri's assessment of the People's Mujahedeen of Iran (MEK [PMOI]) ultimately undermines his own argument for retaining the group on the U.S. list of foreign terrorist organizations ("Iran's Troubling Opposition," June 26).