TEHRAN, Feb 15 (AFP) - Iran's hardline judiciary Tuesday denied imposing any restrictions on Shirin Ebadi, after the Nobel Prize winning human rights lawyer accused it of conniving to prevent her from defending political prisoners.
"There are no restrictions on Mrs Ebadi's activities as a lawyer and if we have behaved to the contrary, that must rectified," judiciary spokesman Jamal Karimi-Rad told a weekly news conference.
"All judiciary officials, including those at detention centres, have to respect the law with regard to lawyers. All Iranian citizens have a right to legal advice, including from Mrs Ebadi," he added.
On Monday, Ebadi said she had been subject to repeated threats for 10 years and that those detained by the legal authorities faced an impossible task in choosing a human rights lawyer to defend them.
Ebadi, who heads a group of Iranian human rights lawyers, said: "Lawyers have been in and out of jail. I have also been in prison. They keep summoning me here and there.
"How can they decide which lawyer can appear in a case and which cannot?" she asked.
The Defenders of Human Rights Center, run by Ebadi, said the conservative judiciary was preparing a law to end the independence of the bar.
Instead it wanted to set up a committee, made up largely of magistrates paid by the justice department to take control of who would be allowed to practise.
The lawyers' group said the law would have a "destructive effect on the independence of lawyers and on the rights of people to defend themselves".
02/15/2005 16:36 GMT - AFP