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| Home Front: Politix | |
| US funds dry up for Iran rights watchdog | |
| 2009-10-06 | |
| WASHINGTON - For the past five years, researchers in a modest office overlooking the New Haven green have carefully documented cases of assassination and torture of democracy activists in Iran. With more than $3 million in grants from the US State Department, they have pored over thousands of documents and Persian-language press reports and interviewed scores of witnesses and survivors to build dossiers on those they say are Iran's most infamous human-rights abusers. But just as the Iran Human Rights Documentation Center was ramping up to investigate abuses of protesters after this summer's disputed presidential election, the group received word that - for the first time since it was formed - its federal funding request had been denied. "If there is one time that I expected to get funding, this was it,'' said Rene Redman, the group's executive director, who had asked for $2.7 million in funding for the next two years. "I was surprised, because the world was watching human rights violations right there on television.''
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