Nearly a year ago in Iran, former prime minister Mir Hossein Moussavi, his wife and adviser Zahra Rahnavard, and reformist parliamentarian Mehdi Karroubi were placed under house arrest, where they’ve languished since, incommunicado with the outside world. Now, as the anniversary of their detention nears, the International Campaign for Human Rights in Iran (ICHRI) is calling on Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei to release the three opposition leaders.

Moussavi and Karroubi were both presidential candidates in the June 2009 election — where critics allege the government committed widespread fraud to keep incumbent Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in power — and subsequently became public faces of the Green opposition movement that faced a brutal regime crackdown.

In addition to an interactive timeline of the house arrests and a letter-writing campaign aimed at freeing the opposition leaders, ICHRI released this short video about the affair:

In the ICHRI release, the group’s spokesman Hadi Ghaemi said:

Khamenei bears the ultimate responsibility for these house arrests, which indeed are nothing short of a kidnapping. Khamenei is operating above the law of the land, and the intelligence and judicial apparatus are tools of repression in his hands, operating with impunity and without any regard for the law or the constitution.

According the ICHRI, the “house arrests are illegal under both Iranian and international law,” and no Iranian agency or official has taken responsibility.

The Persian-language BBC service, beamed into Iran by satellite, has been a thorn in the side of the regime there since its launch in January 2009. During the crisis following the election that June, widely thought to be a fraudulent poll that reinstalled president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the channel garnered attention from viewers inside Iran, according to its annual report. From the start, the Iranian government accused the channel of working on behalf of British intelligence.

This week, Iran escalated the war of words into action, with authorities allegedly harassing BBC Persian employees’ family members in Iran and arresting Iranians it accuses of working directly for the channel. A BBC spokesman released a statement last week accusing Iran of arresting the sister of a BBC Persian employee, amid other intimidation. Then news broke from a state-run agency that Iran detained alleged employees of the network inside Iran. The BBC said in a statement that this couldn’t be true because the “Persian language service does not have a presence in Iran. There are no BBC Persian staff members or stringers working inside Iran.” (In its 2010 annual report, the BBC indicated that much of its content from inside Iran comes from “citizen journalism.”)

Rights groups and journalism advocacy outfits chimed in to join the BBC in condemning the Iranian actions. Citing the recent reports as well as the arrests of other journalists and filmmakers, Middle East director of New York-based Human Rights Watch Sarah Leah Whitson said:

The recent wave of arrests, especially against relatives of journalists working abroad, is a reprehensible escalation in the current campaign to stifle freedom of information in Iran. It is a sober reminder of the lengths Iranian authorities will go to control the airwaves, newspapers, and the internet – even if it means ruining the lives of Iranians at home and abroad.

The Committee to Protect Journalists’ Abdel Dayem added:

Iran’s government must immediately stop its harassment of the friends and family members of journalists. These attacks on journalists beyond Iran’s own borders show the lengths to which Tehran will go to intimidate the media into silence and deprive its constituents of information.

The latest accusations traded between the Iranian government and the BBC follow a recently-heightened pattern of the Iranian regime cracking down on journalists and bloggers. The continuing blocking of websites and satellite jamming of outside news channels — including the U.S.-government sponsored VOA Persian Service — led to a protest last month in Geneva outside of a meeting of the U.N. telecommunications agency calling on the group to work to end censorship and jamming in Iran.

A report released over the weekend by the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan said the civilian death toll of the war there hit an all-time high in 2011. According to the report (PDF), 3,021 civilians died last year in fighting or violent attacks, up eight percent from the 2010 number and nearly double the figure for 2007. Civilian deaths rose for the fifth straight year.

The U.N. placed responsibility for the majority of killings squarely on the shoulders of the Taliban and allied anti-government forces, blaming them for more than three quarters of civilian deaths. Here’s a chart from the U.N. report attributing blame for civilian killings in 2010 and 2011, with blue representing anti-government forces’ responsibility and red representing pro-government forces’ responsibility:

Improvised explosive device (IED) attacks, which accounted for 45 percent of anti-government attacks in a six month period in 2011, caused more civilian deaths — 967 total during 2009 through 2011 — than any other tactic used by anti-government forces. But targeted killings, accounting for nearly 500 deaths in that period, and suicide bombings were also on the rise.

Aerial attacks accounted for the most civilian deaths caused by pro-government forces, which include the U.S.-led international coalition there. The U.N. report noted a nine percent uptick from 2010 to 187 such deaths in 2011. Night raids, which international forces continue to carry out over objections by Afghan president Hamid Karzai, saw a 22 percent drop in civilian deaths from 2010, down to just 63 in 2011.

The report paints a bleak picture for Afghan civilians, with injuries from fighting also on the rise. The report said:

As 2011 unfolded, ordinary Afghan people experienced growing intrusion into and disruption of their daily lives by the armed conflict in their country. Conflict and insecurity displaced 185,632 Afghans in 2011, an increase of 45 percent from 2010.

Thousands more Afghans lost their livelihoods and property, were denied access to justice, had their right to freedom of movement restricted or taken away, and had their access to food, health care and education compromised. The unremitting toll of civilian casualties coupled with pervasive intimidation affected many civilians directly, and many more indirectly, by fueling uncertainty, tension and fear.

With the first signs of possible peace talks and an imminent transition from U.S.-led forces to Afghan forces, the U.N. report called for both sides of the conflict to reaffirm and enforce international humanitarian law.

As the Europeans passed a de facto embargo on Iranian oil and U.S. ships defied threats (since walked back) to shut down the strategically vital Strait of Hormuz, Iran faces heightened diplomatic and economic isolation as another rift became apparent this week when an Iranian presidential adviser complained of cooling relations with Brazil. The report comes only four days after China voiced opposition to a potential Iranian nuclear weapons program.

Brazil, a member of a bloc of emerging economies know and BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa), built a strong trade relationship with Iran and involved itself in Middle East diplomacy under its last president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. Lula, as he is widely known, attempted to broker a confidence-building deal between the West and Iran to diffuse tension over the latter’s nuclear program. But the 2010 deal came just as the Obama administration had rallied international support for another round of U.N. Security Council sanctions aimed at the nuclear program. The U.S. objected to Iran’s condition that the sanctions — since shown to be effective in slowing Iran’s progress — be scuttled.

Now, the New York Times reports, a sometime media adviser to Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad expressed anger that Iran was also losing Brazil:

After President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran took a four-country tour of Latin America this month, during which he met with several outspoken critics of the United States but was notably not invited to stop in Brazil, one of his top advisers took a public swipe at Brazil’s president, Dilma Rousseff, saying she had “destroyed years of good relations” between the two nations.

“The Brazilian president has been striking against everything that Lula accomplished,” Ali Akbar Javanfekr, who has worked as Mr. Ahmadinejad’s top media adviser, said in an interview published Monday by Folha de São Paulo, a leading Brazilian newspaper, in which he compared Ms. Rousseff to her predecessor and political mentor.

In a New Yorker profile of Brazilian president Rousseff late last year, Nicholas Lemann wrote:

After taking office, Rousseff began to distance herself from Lula’s more exotic foreign-policy initiatives. She declared that, as someone who had been tortured, she had special concerns about a government that tortures, and that would influence Brazil’s diplomatic partnership with Iran.

Indeed, quickly after coming to office, Rousseff supported the Obama administration initiative of a U.N. special rapporteur for human rights in Iran, whose eventual report condemned Iranian rights abuses.

In addition to diplomatic fallout, the Times also noted that Iran’s robust trade relations with Brazil have recently cooled.

The report about the Iranian adviser’s comments on Brazil came on the heels of a report last week that another BRICS country spoke out forcefully against suspected Iranian designs on nuclear weapons. China’s premier Wen Jiabao said that, while trade with Iran would be maintained for the meantime, China “adamantly opposes Iran developing and possessing nuclear weapons.”

Activists have already reported that the Syrian regime was deceiving Arab League observers dispatched to monitor the ongoing crackdown against anti-government demonstrators. Yesterday saw another voice accusing the Syrian regime of president Bashar al-Assad of deceiving monitors and continuing its crackdown under their noses: an Arab League monitor who quit his assignment and left the country.

Anwer Malek said on Al Jazeera television that Assad’s government was committing “war crimes,” deceiving observes, stocking demonstrations with loyalists and resuming attacks on protesters as soon as observers left a given area. “Therefore,” he said, “I’ve decided to withdraw from this mission.” While the Arab League didn’t comment, the Associated Press reported that Malek, who was listed as an observer, hails from Tunisia and works for the Arab Committee for Human Rights in Paris.

According to a translation dubbed over Malek’s Arabic on Al Jazeera English, the former observer said:

The mission was a farce, and the observers have been fooled. The regime orchestrated it, fabricated most of what we saw to stop the Arab League [from] taking action against the regime. What I saw was a humanitarian disaster. The regime is not just committing one war crime, but a series of crimes against its people.

The regime didn’t meet any of our requests. In fact, they were trying to deceive us and steer us away from what was really happening towards insignificant things. They didn’t withdraw their tanks from the streets; they just hid them and then redeployed them after we left. The snipers are everywhere shooting at civilians. People are being kidnapped. Prisoners are being tortured, and no one is being released. …

I’ve seen snipers on top of buildings. On one, there were even army officers in front fo the building while snipers were on the roof. Some of our team preferred to maintain good relations with the regime and deny that there are snipers.

Watch the video:

Malek said the regime had “gained a lot of time” to carry out its “plan,” and said the regime sent “spies and intelligence officers” to travel with their team as “drivers and minders.” He said: “As soon as we left an area, they attacked people.”

The U.S.-based International Campaign for Human Rights in Iran (ICHRI) released a report (PDF) today revealing the names of 101 victims of secret executions in Iran. Defining secret as those that “are not publicly reported by authorities and the victim’s family and lawyers have no prior knowledge that the sentence is set to be carried out,” the group documented 101 such executions at only a single prison — Vakilabad — for a period in late 2010. Since January of that year, the group has documented 471 secret executions, with at least 161 in 2011 alone.

In comment to ICHRI, Nobel laureate and Iranian human rights lawyer Shirin Ebadi put the practice in perspective, ascribing to it a political, and not anti-crime motive:

The Iranian judiciary and government know that the death penalty is not a suitable solution for fighting crime, particularly drug-related crimes. The basic question is this: why does the Iranian government use this type of punishment with such enthusiasm? The issue is that these executions only create fear and intimidation and serve only a political purpose. All of the statistics show that while the number of executions have increased the number of drug-related crimes have not decreased at all.

Iran executed a total of about 600 people in 2011. In 2010, the last year for which comprehensive statistics are available, Amnesty International placed Iran second on the world’s list for putting people to death (PDF). Since 2007, Iran is also second in total executions, only behind China which kills thousands a year and keeps exact figures secret.

In a December report, Amnesty said 81 percent of death penalties in Iran were for drug-related offenses, and called on Iran to stop the executions. The State Department’s country reports on human rights for 2010 also made a prominent issue of executions in Iran, documenting many cases of those sentenced to death, and raising the issue of secret executions:

According to multiple sources, the government executed approximately 312 persons in summary executions during the year, many after trials that were conducted in secret or did not adhere to basic principles of due process.

With the release of the ICHRI report, the group’s head Hadi Ghaemi said: “Iran has shown an inability to use the death penalty in a legal and accountable manner. With skyrocketing execution numbers marred by unfair trials and opaque judicial proceedings, it’s time for Iran to institute a moratorium and join the growing trend towards abolition.”