Tehran (AsiaNews/Agencies) University students staged the first demonstration in Tehran against the decision by the Guardian Council to ban reformist candidates, including Mostafa Moin and Mohsen Mehralizadeh, from running in the upcoming presidential election. Both Moin and Mehralizadeh are former cabinet ministers and anti-conservative standard bearers.
The event remained peaceful partly because organisers had repeatedly informed participants that Supreme leader ayatollah Ali Khamenei had told the Council to review its decision to bar the two candidates because he said it was "appropriate that all individuals in the country be given the choice from various political tendencies".
Iran's official news agency IRNA reported that 300 students shouting slogans against the Guardian Council's decision left their university dorms last night to stage a protest.
Dozens of policemen and agents from the anti-riot squad had surrounded the campus and stopped them.
IRNA quoted Interior Ministry sources saying that the police was told not to use force.
Mostafa Moin, a former Minister of Science, Research and Technology and the main candidate for the Islamic Participation Front (Mosharekat), seems to be the only one with any hope to stop a conservative victory in the June 17 election.
His and current reformist Vice-President Mohsen Mehralizadeh's disqualification by the Guardian Councilthe 12-member body that vets presidential and parliamentary candidates to determine their fitness to runas well as that of another thousand candidates leave the way open to only six applicants: former president Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, four conservative hardliners and a reformer with little chances of winning.
The United States and the European Union also criticised the Council's decision.
Moin, who was a member of outgoing President Khatami's second reformist cabinet, quit in August 2003 to protest the conservatives' "systematic obstructionism" to reform.