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Iran

My Lords, I am grateful, as all of your Lordships are, to the noble Lord, Lord Hurd, for introducing this debate and to the Opposition for giving it time. My own engagement with Iran goes back a long time; I had a month there in 1961 and I may be the only Member of your Lordships’ House to see the inside of an Iranian prison. In the light of some of the remarks about the present state of human rights and freedoms, I should say that there is a good deal of loss of memory or perhaps absence of awareness of what life was like in Iran before the revolution in terms of human rights. In my time there I was arrested by Savak, the secret police, on a number of occasions. It was a brutal, horrid regime of torture, denial of freedom of speech and all the rest of it—rather worse, as far as I can gather, than prevails today. Certainly, the press was not as free then as it is now.