Peace prize winner blasts US

Iranian Nobel Peace Prize winner Shirin Ebadi has charged the US and western nations with infringing on human rights "under the cloak of the war on terrorism".

After accepting the $1.4m prize in Oslo on December 10, the 56-year-old lawyer said: "In the past two years, some states have violated the universal principles and laws of human rights by using the events of September 11 and the war on international terrorism as a pretext.

"Regulations restricting human rights and basic freedoms… have been justified and given legitimacy under the cloak of the war on terrorism."

She cited the US detention without trial of Taliban and Al Qaeda activists at Guantanamo base in Cuba and the non-implementation of several UN resolutions on Palestine.

She also pledged to press Tehran to implement the international human rights treaties it has signed, and step up the efforts of her Centre for the Defence of Human Rights, which usually represent defendants in political cases in Iran.

"The concerns of human rights advocates increase when they observe that international human rights laws… are also violated in Western democracies… For months, hundreds of individuals who were arrested in the course of military conflicts have been imprisoned in Guantanamo without the benefit of rights stipulated under the International Geneva conventions, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the United Nations International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights," she said.

"The decision by the Nobel Peace committee to award the 2003 prize to me, as the first Iranian and the first woman from an Islamic country, inspires me and millions of Iranians and nationals of Islamic states with the hope that our efforts, endeavours and struggles toward the realisation of human rights and the establishment of democracy… enjoy the support, backing and solidarity of international civil society. The prize belongs to the people of Iran. It belongs to the people of Islamic states and the people of the South."