Iran's Judiciary Chief Mahmoud Hashemi Shahroudi has slammed the West for using human rights issue as a political tool against Muslim states.

"The Western world has turned human rights into a baton that can be used against Islamic countries," Ayatollah Sharoudi said in Tehran on Tuesday.

"Countries that claim to follow human rights and freedom have carried out countless crimes under the pretext of these two concepts and today the same atrocities are committed but with new twists," he added.

Washington and its Western allies accuse Iran and several other Muslim states of violating human rights, particularly the issues concerned with women.

However, Muslim women regard Islamic guidelines as liberating rather than oppressing, because they oppose Western values that objectify and degrade women.

A 2005 Gallup poll showed that Muslim women do not think they are oppressed or conditioned to accept a second-class status.

In more than 8,000 interviews conducted in eight Muslim countries, it found that women in the Muslim world do not see gender issue as a priority.

A majority of Muslim women polled said a lack of unity among Muslim nations, violent extremism, and political and economic corruption were what they resented most in their own societies.

The hijab (Islamic code of dress symbolized by head scarf), which is seen by some Westerners as a tool of oppression, was never brought up in the women's answers, the poll analysts said.

The women questioned also said that the factors they least admired about the West were moral decay, promiscuity and pornography.

An overwhelming majority of the respondents believed that 'attachment to moral and spiritual values' were the best aspect of their own societies.

MJ/PA