Inmates at Gohardasht prison in Karaj and Evin Prison in Tehran also demanded free access to medical treatment, phone calls and family visits which are being denied to prisoners across Iran.
In a letter to Dr Ahmed Shaheed, the United Nations’ Special Rapporteur on Situation of Human Rights in Iran, they wrote: “We want freedom, equality and respect for the rights of all citizens in Iran to live in peace and harmony besides each other regardless of their race or belief.
“Our ideals, political organizations, political parties and any kind of political act have been faced with the suppression of the regime, which has imposed heavy sentences on us as political prisoners, prisoners of conscience and human rights.
“The Iranian government has created trouble and hardship for many families by imprisoning hundreds of innocent people. As a result, it has imposed terror in an unprecedented way on the country.”
They accused the regime of shutting down all avenues for legal campaigns, suppressing the popular will and preventing international action to investigate the human rights situation in Iran.
The letter added: “We the undersigned, call for coming of a fact finding mission and the Special Rapporteur on the situation of Human Rights to visit Iran’s prisons.
“You should meet with personalities, political groups and the families of those executed and imprisoned. And the Iranian authorities must stop harassment, pressure, abuse and unjustified exile and repression.
“They must address the medical condition of ill prisoners where long term detention, interrogation with beating and torture and solitary confinement are the main cause of their illness, and to stop preventing sending patients to hospitals under various pretexts.
“The judiciary has no independence and it is the security apparatus that controls the situation of prisoners. Most of the detainees are kept for months without any charge in solitary confinement in the Intelligence Ministry and the IRGC under pressure and without access to their families.
“Over the past few years, we have never been given the right to use the telephone and other facilities. We are given insufficient and bad quality food that causes outbreak of gastrointestinal illness in prison.
“Besides all these cases, prison and security officials, body search the prisoners in such an offensive and obscene way.”
The prisoners said the regime had perpetually removed citizens’ rights under the cover of religious rule, and by condemned and suppressed all political movements.
Dozens of Kurdish citizens and other ethnic or religious minorities, including Bahais, Zoroastrians, Christians and Gonabadi Dervishes, had all been detained and sentenced to long term prisons and exile, many without without access to a lawyer or a fair trial, the letter said.
It added: “The charges against all these people include having a different belief than the official religion of the country, political activities, human rights activities, efforts to create or membership in an organization or association, writing critical writings or simply a weblog.
“When the Head of the Judiciary Human Rights Committee, Mohammad Javad Larijani, calls your report as Special Rapporteur for Human Rights unreal and a puppet of the West in utmost indecency, and the local media calls you ‘stupid and vicious’, you can guess what inhumane treatment we have been receiving.”