The UN Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD) raised several questions to Iran’s delegation on the rights of LGBTI individuals in its two-day review last week, including the questions about coercive treatments.
The Islamic Republic of Iran’s representative at the UN’s 17th Session of the CRPD, which took place in Geneva 22-23 March 2017, denied subjecting persons with different sexual orientation to any conversion treatments including electroshock therapy.
6Rang had previously submitted to the Committee an ‘alternative report’ manifesting the results of its field study on the situation of homosexual and transgender individuals in Iran. The submission focuses on two sets of abusive practices in particular: “reparative therapies” intended to “cure” homosexuality; and grossly substandard sex reassignment surgeries which are carried out without free and informed consent and afflict transgender persons with long-lasting physical or mental health conditions and illnesses, impairments and disability.
“Concerning article 8, it is not as clear at the moment whether there is any linkage between mental illness and sexual orientation [in Iranian law]. It was informed to us that persons who are transsexual or who are in need of expressing their different sexual orientation could be deemed as persons with psychosocial disability,” noted Monthian Buntan, the member of CRPD, in the first interactive dialogue between the Committee members and the Iranian delegation. “If that is the case, persons with psychosocial disabilities are to be “fixed” so that they are not going to behave in contradiction to norms or undergo the operation? In that case I would like to know how the image of persons who are believed to have psychosocial or mental disabilities and persons with different sexual orientation are covered in the Iranian law. I would like to know how the Iranian government has tried to tackle this confusion between having mental disability and having different sexual orientation,” he added. Read more via 6rang.org