A senior Iranian legislator accused Germany on Monday of meddling in Iran's affairs by granting asylum to Iranians who fled the Islamic state after a crackdown on post-election protests.
Germany confirmed on Saturday that it was giving asylum to dozens of dissident Iranians who participated in post-election protest rallies. Most of the refugees were journalists critical of the government.
"It is natural that the enemies of the Iranian nation would give medals and prizes to their soldiers and stooges," Hossien Ebrahimi, deputy chairman of Iran’s parliamentary committee on security and foreign policy, was quoted as saying by the official news agency IRNA.
Thousands of opposition supporters were detained after President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was returned to power in a contested vote in June 2009. Most of them have since been freed but more than 80 people have been jailed for up to 15 years. Two people put on trial after the election have been executed.
Iran has accused Western countries of fomenting anti-government protests, something they have denied.
Ebrahimi said Germany’s decision to welcome people it considers dissidents amounted to interference.
"Does it not bother Berlin if a riot happens in Germany and then some other countries start interfering in its internal affairs by giving awards and granting asylum to the rioters?
"Why, now that the fire of sedition has been extinguished and the seditionists have been banished by people, has Germany started to grant asylum to them?" said Ebrahimi.
Journalist sentenced
Earlier on Monday an opposition website reported that Iran has sentenced award-winning journalist Emadeddin Baghi to a year in prison and banned him from political activities for five years,
Baghi, who is also a well-known human rights activist, has been "sentenced to one year in prison and banned from political activities for five years after a two-year trial for forming a group defending the rights of prisoners," the Rahesabz website said.
Baghi is awaiting a second trial on charges levelled by the intelligence ministry over his appearance in an interview with late dissident cleric Grand Ayatollah Hossein Ali Montazeri broadcast by the BBC Persian service, the report said.
He was arrested on December 28, a day after opposition protests during a Shiite religious festival saw eight people killed in one of the deadliest crackdowns on anti-government demonstrators.
He was released on bail in June.
Baghi has been campaigning against the death penalty and won the prestigious Martin Ennals Award for human rights activism in 2009.
Rahesabz also reported that Iranian police tried to execute an arrest warrant for the lawyer of a woman sentenced to death by stoning for adultery in a case that sparked an international outcry.
"Security agents went to the office of Mohammad Mostafaie on Saturday afternoon with an arrest warrant but the lawyer was not there," the website said.
"They did not manage to arrest him. But on Saturday night they arrested his wife Fereshteh Halimi and her brother Farhad Halimi from near his office. There is no news of Mohammad Mostafaie," the report posted on Sunday said.