Iran has stepped up the number of floggings and executions...

Iran has stepped up the number of floggings and executions and introduced barbaric new punishments, amid accusations that the West is turning a blind eye to human rights abuses in seeking Iranian support for an attack on Iraq, the Telegraph reported.
So far in 2002 there have been 292 public executions in Iran, most of the victims hanged from cranes in public squares, the newspaper said. Those executed included a former member of Iran's national wrestling team, a leading economist, several housewives and many young men under the age of 18.
Human rights organisations point to the steep rise in executions from 139 in 2001 and 75 in 2000, and say that stonings are being carried out for the first time since the mid-1990s.
"Everyone is getting worked up about the sentence of stoning to death of one woman in Nigeria," said Ahmed Ibrahim from the Foreign Affairs Committee of the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI), a leading opposition group. "Yet in Iran they are stoning large numbers, never mind gouging out their eyes, cutting off their hands and hanging people and no one says anything."
Secret footage smuggled out of Iran by the NCRI and seen by The Sunday Telegraph showed young people dangling from cranes, stonings and gouging out of eyes.
Jack Straw, the Foreign Secretary, visited Iran earlier in October as part of a tour of Iraq's neighbours. Rather than condemn the regime for human rights abuses, he is understood to have offered his counterpart, Kamal Kharrazi, Britain's help in getting Iran taken off America's list of pariah states in return for its support against Saddam.
"He had a long tete-a-tete with Mr Kharrazi and almost the entire focus of the meeting was Iraq," said a Foreign Office official. "But he did remind the Iranians that they should address a number of fundamental issues of concern to the international community, including human rights."
This is the first time in 20 years that there has been no United Nations resolution condemning human rights abuses in Iran.
Five young men were hanged in a bus station in Teheran, the day before a European Union delegation arrived. The men were said to be gang rapists but relatives insisted that they were students. The subject was not raised by the EU delegation.
When President Mohammad Khatami came to power in 1997 as a reformer, there was hope that Iran might be on the way to becoming a democracy.
Instead the clerics' grip on power has been boosted by a speech by President George W Bush in January in which he included Iran as part of the "axis of evil" along with North Korea and Iraq as states sponsoring terrorism.
"What Bush said gave all the power to the mullahs who used it as an argument that there was no point reforming or seeking to appease the West," said Ibrahim.