Human Rights & Democracy for Iran
A project of the Abdorrahman Boroumand Foundation

Interrupted Lives

Interrupted Lives: Portraits of Student Repression in Iran

Newsletter/updates

Iran’s leadership guilty of crimes against humanity

Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei, former President Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, recent presidential candidate Mir Hossein Moussavi, and a number of sitting and retired judges and officials, including former head of the Supreme Court, Abdolkarim Mousavi Ardebili, are all liable to arrest under international law for complicity in the murder of thousands of political prisoners at the end of the Iran/Iraq War. This is the conclusion of a 145-page report by Geoffrey Robertson QC, who urges the Security Council to set up a special court, along the lines of the International Tribunals for Yugoslavia and Rwanda, to try these men “for one of the worst single human rights atrocities since the Second World War”.

The report concludes that the leaders were guilty of implementing a fatwa issued by Ayatollah Khomeini in July 1988, which sentenced thousands of political prisoners to death without a trial. At Tehran’s notorious Evin Prison and twenty other prisons throughout Iran, dissidents who had previously been sentenced to various prison terms and had refused to recant their religious beliefs were blindfolded and paraded before judges who directed thousands to the gallows. “They were hung from cranes, four at a time, or in groups of six from ropes hanging from the stage of the prison assembly hall. Their bodies were doused with disinfectant, packed in refrigerated trucks, and buried by night in mass graves, the locations of which are still withheld from their families.”

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A Story from the Memorial

Reza Ta'i

Age: 22

Occupation: university student

Religion: Presumed Muslim

Nationality: Iran

The information about Mr. Reza Ta’i, son of Aziz, has been drawn from an article by Mr. Hamed Knani, published on the Akhbar Rooz website on November 19, 2009. Iran News Agency reported this event... (read more...)

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Reported executions

This year (2010): 169

Last year (2009): 399

In 2008: 381

In 2007: 468

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