Media freedom needed to fight corruption, says Iranian VP Ebtekar

Corruption thrives in the absence of free media, according to Masoumeh Ebtekar, the first female vice president of Iran, who has called on the Iranian and Turkish governments to work together against corruption.

"One of the major strategies that the government of [Hassan] Rouhani is pursuing is to combat corruption," Ebtekar told Hürriyet in Istanbul recently when asked about the corruption allegations in Turkey, which also have links to Iran.

Ebtekar comes from an activist background. At the age of 19, she was the spokesperson for the students who occupied the U.S. Embassy in Tehran in 1979 and held American diplomats hostage.
She continued her career as an academic and was appointed as the head of the Environment Protection Organization of Iran during the administration of President Mohammad Khatami.
When asked about the relations between the U.S. and Iran, Ebtakar said Iran "looks forward to an improvement of relations."

Environment and technology are sometimes at odds with each other. Countries like Turkey aspire to have a nuclear power plant, countries like yours are already developing a nuclear program. How in a modern world can these two go together without conflicting?

That is a major theme that we are pursuing in the ECO ministerial discussions. We have to make the connection between development and environment. The sustainability of the development process has to be maintained. That is an important aspect of our efforts. That has been done in many parts of the world. They have made proper processes whereby through different development activities, they have to perform an environment impact assessment before being able to actually execute that plan or process. We have that law now in Iran. We recently adopted the...