Aqeel: The Iranian regime is using the right to water as a weapon with which it is fighting Ahwaz 

 Nourhan Mustafa: Minorities in Iran face difficult living conditions

In an intervention before the United Nations Human Rights Council, Maat Foundation for Peace, Development and Human Rights criticized the continuing grave violations of indigenous peoples in Iran, which suffer from restrictions that hinder them from exercising their basic rights, including the right to have safe and clean drinking water. And on the sidelines of the work of the 42nd session of the Council currently being held in Geneva.

The intervention explained that the regions inhabited by minorities complain of the marginalization of the Iranian authorities and their failure to develop these regions, and they also deal violently and arrogantly with their residents, especially after the authorities entrusted the security of the border area to the Revolutionary Guard Corps, which committed numerous violations against the residents of these regions.

Ayman Aqil, head of Maat Foundation, affirmed that the Iranian authorities are using the right to obtain safe drinking water as a weapon to fight against Ahwaz who own five fresh rivers, as Iran uses water as one of the systematic projects and policies to displace the Ahwazi people and to change the demographics and to build projects that are or are planned in advance Aqeel added that the goal is to eliminate the Ahwazi people and their source of livelihood from agriculture, destroy their crops, destroy their lands, and displace them from their cities and villages.

For her part, Nourhan Mustafa, a researcher at the Maat Foundation, said that indigenous peoples in Al-Ahwaz region face sub-standard living conditions or are under threat of forced eviction from their ancestral lands without their free and prior consent, which undermines their enjoyment of other rights such as the right to health, safe drinking water and sanitation services. . Nourhan also called on the international community to take immediate steps to hold accountable all those responsible for what happens to the Ahwaz people. And the need to pressure the Iranian authorities to conduct an investigation into what is happening in draining the rivers of Ahwaz, and to stop building dams, which affects the percentage of potable water for Ahwaz.