Abdorrahman Boroumand Center

These are unprecedented times in the history of the Islamic Republic of Iran. Its leaders, weakened by the blows dealt to them and their proxies in recent years, have turned their wrath against their own people. So far in 2025, Iran’s killing frenzy has cost at least 2,022 lives, a record high since 1989. They have accelerated executions, weaponized espionage charges, assassinated and intimidated dissidents inside and outside the country, and increased penalties for dissent to deter and silence Iranians. On December 29, the second day of peaceful protests triggered by the sharp drop in Iran’s currency value, the notorious Chief Justice is already threatening the protesters with execution.

Yet, Iranians have continued to stand up for their rights. From women fighting a war of attrition against the mandatory hijab, forcing the State to retreat, to dissidents who continue to speak up while incarcerated and once released from prison and mourning families who fight for the truth and justice after the killing of their loved ones, they challenge the State. The Islamic Republic’s repression and violence has not stopped the spread of dissent nor deterred human rights reporting. Hence Iran’s mobilization to engage, distract, and mislead the international community. 

Iran’s International Engagement Strategy

For years, the Iranian government has pursued a strategy of expanding its international footprint, including inside UN bodies, to lobby against sanctions and deflect scrutiny of its human rights record. An “active engagement” approach articulated in the Fifth Five-Year Development Plan (2011–2016) and reiterated in subsequent plans, which tasked the Ministry of Foreign Affairs with strengthening Iran’s international influence, including by seeking to “reform” the UN in line with Iran’s national interests, halting the adoption of UN human rights resolutions against the Islamic Republic, and later (in the Sixth Plan, 2017) “safeguarding” Iran’s human-rights reputation by countering “baseless allegations” and promoting “Islamic human rights.” 

Today, Iran sits on the Human Rights Council and on the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) intergovernmental bodies, notably the Commission on Crime Prevention and Criminal Justice (CCPCJ) and the Commission on Narcotic Drugs (CND), helping shape agendas on “efficiency and fairness” in criminal justice and drug control even as it executes hundreds annually for non-violent drug offenses in a system marked by blatant due-process violations and noncompliance with international human rights obligations.

In 2025, Iran engaged actively with the UN human rights mechanisms, including the special rapporteurs, and organized an exhibit and side events showcasing the victims of the 12-day war with Israel for whom it claimed compensation. At the same time, its representatives tried to undermine human rights organizations active at the UN like Abdorrahman Boroumand Center for Human Rights in Iran (ABC) and ignored the communications of the independent UN Fact-Finding Mission on Iran (FFMI), which documents and reports its crimes during the 2022 protests and beyond and seeks ways to hold its leaders accountable. 

An active presence on the international stage affords the Islamic Republic an opportunity to shape the narrative on its policies and human rights record by promoting misinformation, hence the importance of the monitoring and reporting work of the UN Special Rapporteur on the Situation of Human Rights in Iran and of the FFMI. In the absence of access to the country, the work of these mechanisms relies on civil society. With the serious funding cuts affecting these human rights mechanisms in 2025, coupled with a surge in human rights violations, Iranian human rights groups like ABC and their vast network of sources inside and outside Iran are critical for filling that gap. 

2025 has been a trying year. In the midst of a human rights crisis aggravated by the 12 day war, and despite lacking resources, ABC continued actively its documentation of executions, public education work and grew and added to its interactive mapping tools, all while supporting the UN mechanisms.   

Documenting 46-years of Protests and Dissent 

Three years after the Woman, Life, Freedom protests, ABC launched the Rights Denied: Mapping the Suppression of Protesters in Iran interactive map, exposing the breadth of the Islamic Republic’s violent crackdown of protests over 46 years. The searchable map offers a window into protests, obscure or high profile, old and new, inside, and sometimes outside, Iran and the systematic use of disproportionate force and arbitrary killing of Iranians who dared voice their grievances against the government.

 ABC has documented over 560 protests violently suppressed by the Islamic Republic since February 1979. Even this is not representative of all the protests which have occurred inside Iran - just the ones that have resulted in state violence, arrests, and deaths and that ABC could document. 

The map features individuals killed for protesting the denial of their sovereignty in the new constitution in Qom in 1979, demanding jobs and economic rights in Andimeshk in 1980, or protesting the forced evictions and attempts to destroy illegally-constructed dwellings in Mashhad in 1992; students killed for protesting the cultural revolution and the closure of the universities in 1981 in Tehran are featured on as well as those killed for exposing state violence outside Iran, in the Philippines in 1982 for example; Iranians protesting electoral results in Izeh in 2004 or in other cities in 2009; demonstrations against the alleged central government’s call for a demographic restructuring of the Arab population in Khuzestan and protesting State violence in Saqqez in 2005; protests against fuel price hikes in 2019; and the nationwide 2022-23 Woman, Life, Freedom uprising among scores of others.

The 767 victims’ stories recorded on the map so far shed light on the drivers, scale, and geographic reach of protests in Iran, and on the Islamic Republic’s violent suppression extending beyond Iran's borders. Still a work in progress, the map captures only a fraction of the total cases.

ABC’s research into protest suppression goes beyond unlawful killings to also expose the state’s other punitive measures, the impunity granted to perpetrators, and structural barriers to organized dissent. This year our team identified and added over 200 flogging sentences issued (mostly in Tehran) to protesters since 2005 for “disrupting public order” and participating in “illegal” protests, including 45 from 2025. Yet, in Iran virtually all protests critical of the government, or violating the undefined “fundamental principles of Islam,” are illegal. Permission to protest is seldom granted and restricted to formally registered associations and organizations, a status also denied to organizations and parties whose belief in the tenets of the Islamic Republic are not proven. 

As part of our ongoing research on the structural barriers to exercising the right to protest in Iran, our researchers interviewed, translated, and published the testimonies of seven activists who recount their experience of navigating the complex and arbitrary nature of Iran’s permit approval process for protests, and the beatings, threats, and imprisonment they and others faced when organizing both “legal” and “illegal” protests.

On October 30, ABC, in collaboration with the Iran Human Rights Documentation Center, and PEN America, organized a side event on “No Space for Dissent – The Right to Protest in Iran” in New York which highlighted Iranian civil society’s documentation of the Islamic Republic’s violent protest suppression and structural barriers activists have faced. The event fostered constructive dialogue on pathways to protect and strengthen the right to protest in Iran among member-states, UN experts, and civil society actors and included statements made by the Special Rapporteur Dr. Mai Sato, ABC’s Executive Director Roya Boroumand, and victims of state violence during the 2009, 2018, and 2022 protest movements. 

In 2025, ABC also continued its research and advocacy efforts to bring attention to Iran’s use of extrajudicial executions and transnational repression (TNR). ABC expanded the interactive map published in December 2024 and collected information on recent assassinations and death threats aimed at silencing activists, journalists, artists, and others and actively raised the issue in multilateral bodies, including the UN and the European Union Parliament, calling governments to seriously address TNR.

ABC also took the lead to organize with Front Line Defenders a side event on Iran’s transnational repression against human rights defenders in Geneva during the UN Human Rights Council’s 60th session in September, featuring statements by an FFMI expert (Max du Plessis), Dr. Sato, ABC, Front Line Defenders, Human Rights Watch, and victims of TNR. The event coincided with the UN General Assembly (UNGA) Third Committee’s deliberation over the draft text for the resolution on the situation of human rights in Iran, amplifying our advocacy efforts for the inclusion of explicit language on transnational repression.

For the first time, the text of the UNGA resolution, adopted on December 18, expressly condemned Iran’s use of transnational repression to silence victims, survivors, and victims’ family members abroad, acknowledging Iran’s decades-long policy of intimidation and violence outside its borders. 

Honoring Victims and Promoting Justice: Expanding the Omid Memorial 

Facing Iran’s execution crisis, ABC’s research team, made up of a representative group of victims of Iran’s state violence themselves, have actively collected information, updated ABC’s master lists, interviewed victims, and expanded the Omid Memorial. More than 220 pages of victims’ stories (of which 141 are detailed) have been added to the database, now totaling over 27,190 victims since 1979. The Omid Memorial serves as a digital space for remembering individuals taken by the Islamic Republic through unlawful executions and arbitrary and extrajudicial killings and to prevent the truth from being buried with them, and support the healing process for families. It also promotes accountability by providing information on flaws in legal proceedings and the context surrounding victims’ deaths to shed light on broader patterns of rights abuses. 

While the Islamic Republic treats the lives of most citizens as dispensable, the Omid Memorial values all lives. We document the State’s violation of the right to life and due process regardless of victims’ alleged crimes or when or where and how they were killed. Some examples of cases added to the Omid Memorial in 2025 include:

 At only 16, Sarina Sa’edi was socially and politically aware. She encouraged her classmates to remove portraits of the leaders of the Islamic Republic from classroom walls and tear their pictures out of textbooks and joined the Woman, Life, Freedom demonstrations. On October 27, 2022, Sarina was brutally attacked by security forces with batons while writing anti-government slogans on the city walls of Sanandaj and died later that day. Officers pressured her father to say on camera that Sarina committed suicide by threatening to detain his son and withhold her body. 

 Mobin Mirkazehi was only 14-years old when he was fatally shot by security officers in Khash in Sistan and Baluchestan on November 4, 2022 while returning from Friday prayers. At least 18 individuals, including Mobin and one other child were killed by live ammunition during protests in solidarity with the nationwide Woman, Life, Freedom demonstrations, in what would become known as Khash’s “Bloody Friday”. According to a relative of Mobin, the Mirkazehis were pressured to waive their right to file a complaint in exchange for diya (blood money). 

During protests in Shiraz against the recently announced price hike of gasoline on November 16, 2019, security forces shot 15 year old Mohammad Dastankhah in the heart, killing him instantly, when he was walking home from grade school. In response to his family’s complaint against the armed forces, Fars provincial authorities decided to not prosecute the Basij forces as they claimed they were acting in self-defense during the protests, and instead shifted the blame on Mohammad for being present “in full awareness of the area’s insecurity,” “amid the city’s unrest”. 

 A day later on November 17 in Tehran, Ameneh Shahbazifard,  was on her way home when she saw a young man who had been shot in the leg during the protests. While tending to his injury, security forces fatally shot her from behind in the neck. Authorities released her body on the condition that the funeral be held quietly and that no one speak publicly about the case. Her mother and brother, however, refused to remain silent and were repeatedly threatened by security forces. Ms. Shahbazifard, 36, had two young sons.  

 Mohammad Arian Khoshgovar was attacked and severely injured by security forces with knives and batons on his way home on November 17, 2022 during protests in Sanandaj. After spending four months in a semi-conscious state, he finally succumbed to his injuries on March 14, 2023. According to footage captured on a local resident's cell phone, more than ten security officers armed with knives and batons attacked and brutally beat Arian. No arrests were made in his murder. He was 17-years old. 

Charged with murder, moharebeh (“enmity against God”), and corruption on earth, Saleh Mirhashemi Baltaqi was executed in Isfahan’s Central Prison on May 18, 2022. A karate coach and newly-wed, Mr. Mirhashemi and nine other defendants joined the Woman, Life, Freedom protests in Negahbani Square in Isfahan on November 16 when they were accused of murdering two Basij officers. The case of the ten defendants, known as the “Khaneh-ye Isfahan” case, was one of the highest-profile judicial cases linked to the 2022 protests. Authorities coerced Mr. Mirhashemi into making a confession by torturing him and threatening his family. He was denied access to a lawyer of his choosing for months during his detention, even after his death sentence was issued. Mr. Mirshahemi was 36 years old.

Leila Kargar Haji Abadi, a devout 42-year old Bahá’í woman from Shiraz died on December 31, 2014, after being poisoned with aluminum phosphide, a chemical with a strong, unpleasant taste, under suspicious circumstances after having a conversation on religion with an unknown Muslim woman who had offered her fruit juice in the Namazi Park. Authorities withheld her body, confiscated medical documents, while refusing to provide autopsy results or toxicology reports, only issuing a death certificate stating the cause as unknown. Her death occurred amid heightened anti-Bahá’í rhetoric in Shiraz, and her family’s attempts to seek justice were met with intimidation, interrogation, and obstruction by state authorities.  

Nuraddin Mohammad Gharibi Khorasani was on his way to a Quran class when two

individuals fatally shot him on June 15, 1998 in Dushanbe, Tajikistan. Two months before his death, he was threatened and had even survived a previous attempted assassination. Mr. Gharibi, a Sunni Muslim from Khorasan, was repeatedly summoned by security forces as a teenager because of his religious activities. He left Iran at the age of 17 and never returned. After living in Saudi Arabia and Afghanistan, he moved to Tajikistan where he taught the Quran. Before his death, he had told a relative that “No matter where I go in the world, they will kill me.”  

On July 25, 1980, Mohammad Reza Rostami, 25 years old, was executed by a firing squad along with three others in Unesco Prison in Dezful, Khuzestan. Mr. Rostami, who had returned from America after the revolution, is believed to have been arrested in Andimeshk for taking photographs of protests led by the Independent Union of the Unemployed Workers, of which he was a member. The Revolutionary Guards accused Mr. Rostami of “large-scale use of public funds, transferring assets out of Iran, informing on Iranian students, maintaining cordial relations with the CIA in the United States, and inciting and planning the Andimeshk clashes.”

Turning Evidence into Headlines and Accountability

By late 2025, with over 2,000 documented executions as of December 29, the Islamic Republic’s assault on the right to life has reached the highest record since 1988. Over 50% of these executions are related to non-violent drug offences, affecting disproportionately Iranian ethnic and religious minorities. 

ABC is a source of information and analysis for the media and the policy world. In February, Roya Boroumand was interviewed by Deutsche Welle on elections in Iran. Amidst and after the June war with Israel, it swiftly drew attention to the accelerated rate of executions and heightened repression. Roya was interviewed by ABC News on how Iranian authorities had begun turning their wrath against their own people to project strength internally after Israel’s humiliating blow. She was also interviewed or quoted on Iran’s execution frenzy by the BBC, Iran International, French public television, AFP, and Fox News. Her article cautioning policy makers against focusing solely on Iran’s nuclear ambitions was published in the Time Magazine. 

To contextualize the scope of these killings, ABC released several publications, including One More Excuse to Kill: Espionage Weaponized in Iran’s Unrelenting Assault on the Right to Life on September 24 which analyzed the State’s efforts to criminalize peaceful protest activities and the weaponization of the national security offences which carry the death penalty to tighten the iron grip over its people. On October 10, ABC exposed Iran’s growing use of capital punishment for non-violent drug offences through our report, Forgotten Behind Closed Doors: Iran Must Be Held to Account for the Mass Executions of Alleged Drug Offenders. 

Earlier in the year, ABC’s team also released newsletters to mark the 30-year anniversary of Iran’s bombing of the AMIA Jewish Community Center in Buenos Aires as well as the Islamic Republic’s misinformation campaign to mislead member-states by undermining the UN Resolution to extend and expand the mandate of the UN Special Rapporteur and the FFMI. 

ABC remains a trusted source of verified information for international and regional media, from PBS, France24, Deutsche Welle, ABC Australia, Iran International, among many others. Similarly, this year our data has been cited in investigative reports on Iran’s human rights abuses, including the report of the FFMI, the Report of the Special Rapporteur on the Situation of Human Rights in Iran, and the U.S. Department of State’s Country Report on Human Rights Practices in Iran.    

Help Us Keep Up with Iran’s Record Toll of Violence

ABC’s documentation enables us to remember victims of Iran’s violence and fight against oblivion. We try to ensure that no act of violence, no victim’s story, and no pattern of repression goes unnoticed. Our efforts empower survivors, support accountability, and establish an evidentiary base for international investigations and transitional justice for a post-Islamic Republic. As the Islamic Republic intensifies its crackdowns and executions, the need for accurate, comprehensive documentation becomes even more urgent. 

As we begin our 25th year, we are grateful to everyone who has stood with the Abdorrahman Boroumand Center. But this is a time of rising need and shrinking resources, and your support is vital. Funding for Iran-related human rights work is declining while we need to scale-up our work. Violence and impunity thrive when victims have no names and society has no voice. Your donation helps bring the truth to light and keep pressure on those responsible. 

Please consider a monthly donation, a one-time end-of-the-2025-year donation today, or mail a check in the new year to sustain this urgent work. Every dollar donated will contribute to more stolen lives documented and honored.