Conservative MPs within Iran’s Parliament are proposing that Iranians should only be allowed to vote for members of their own religious group.
In Iran, where 90-95% of the population is Shia Muslim, this will essentially mean that it will be impossible for members of religious minorities to be elected.
Mansour Borji, from the advocacy group Article 18, said that the move shows ‘the ruling conservative clerics are concerned about their increasing unpopularity, as they are taking harsher measures to block members of religious minorities from higher office.’
In April, Ahmad Jannati, a conservative cleric and senior member of Iran’s Guardian Council, said that religious minorities should not be allowed to stand as candidates at all, since this violated the wishes of the Islamic Republic’s founding father, Ayatollah Khomeini.
However, journalists, lawyers and even some Members of Parliament have pointed to the presence of three Christians, a Jew and a Zoroastrian in Iran’s national Parliament. Indeed, it is in Iran’s national Constitution that each of the three minority groups is allowed a representative in Parliament.
