Crackdown Seeks to Stifle Iran’s Critical Voices

Those behind bars include German national Jamshid Sharmahd who faces the death penalty in a trial expected to reach its conclusion in the next weeks. (AFP)
Those behind bars include German national Jamshid Sharmahd who faces the death penalty in a trial expected to reach its conclusion in the next weeks. (AFP)
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Crackdown Seeks to Stifle Iran’s Critical Voices

Those behind bars include German national Jamshid Sharmahd who faces the death penalty in a trial expected to reach its conclusion in the next weeks. (AFP)
Those behind bars include German national Jamshid Sharmahd who faces the death penalty in a trial expected to reach its conclusion in the next weeks. (AFP)

Executions on a scale not seen for years. Mass arrests of regime critics including top film-makers. Trials of foreign nationals denounced as a sham by their families.

Activists argue Iran is in the throes of an intensified crackdown affecting all sectors of society from trade union activists, to campaigners against the enforced wearing of the headscarf for women, to religious minorities.

The repression comes one year into the rule of President Ebrahim Raisi, the ultra-conservative former judiciary chief who in August 2021 took over from the more moderate Hassan Rouhani.

Raisi and supreme leader Ali Khamenei, who remains Iran's number one figure, are battling an economic crisis, as well as a sequence of disasters, including a deadly building collapse in Abadan in May, that have sparked unusual protests.

The economic troubles are partially caused by sanctions over the Iranian nuclear program. But there is so far no sign world powers and Iran's leadership are close to the breakthrough needed to revive the 2015 deal over the atomic drive.

"The current crackdown is intimately linked with the upsurge of protests in Iran," said Ali Fathollah-Nejad, Iran expert at the Issam Fares Institute for Public Policy and International Affairs and American University of Beirut.

He said nationwide protests in December 2017 and November 2019 had left their mark on Iran's leadership and, while the protests are at root socio-economically driven, they "swiftly turn political and have targeted the entire establishment."

"Street protests continue to be a threat to regime stability," he told AFP.

'Instill fear'

The rise in executions has been startling, with Iran putting to death twice as many people in the first half of 2022 as it did in the same period a year earlier, according to Iran Human Rights, a Norway-based NGO, which now counts at least 318 hangings this year.

Amnesty International has said Iran is on an "execution spree" with hangings now proceeding at a "horrifying pace". IHR said that those executed have included 10 women, with three hanged in a single day on July 27, all for murdering their husbands.

Meanwhile, Iran has also resumed amputating the fingers of prisoners convicted of theft, with at least two people suffering this punishment this year which was implemented by a guillotine specially installed in Tehran's Evin prison, Amnesty said.

Meanwhile, on July 23, Iran also carried out its first public execution in two years.

"The widespread executions are used by the authorities to instill fear in society to prevent further anti-government protests," said IHR's director Mahmood Amiry Moghaddam.

'Repressive reflex'

There has been a growing movement inside and outside Iran -- based around the hashtag "#edam_nakon" (don't execute) -- to halt the use of the death penalty in the country, which executes more people annually than any nation other than China.

One prominent voice has been director Mohammad Rasoulof, whose chilling anti-capital punishment movie "There is No Evil" won the Golden Bear at the Berlin film festival in 2020.

But Rasoulof was arrested in early July after launching in May a petition from directors and actors urging security forces to lay down their arms in the face of protests.

Fellow prize-winning director Jafar Panahi, who for years has been unable to leave Iran, was then detained when he went two days later to inquire about the whereabouts of Rasoulof and told he had to serve a six-year sentence previously handed out.

Behind bars, they join other celebrated dissidents, including the rights activist Narges Mohammadi whose life, rights groups fear, is at risk due to health conditions prison authorities are failing to treat.

The crackdown has also seen the arrest of a number of relatives of victims of the authorities' violent suppression of protests in November 2019 who have been seeking justice for their loved ones.

"There is no reason to believe these recent arrests are anything but cynical moves to deter popular outrage at the government's widespread failures," said Tara Sepehri Far, senior Iran researcher at Human Rights Watch, accusing the government of resorting to "its repressive reflex of arresting popular critics".

'Outrageous'

At least 20 dual or foreign nationals remain jailed, under house arrest or stuck in Iran, according to the New York based Center for Human Rights in Iran (CHRI), in what their families term a policy of hostage-taking aimed at extracting concessions from the West.

In July, Iran allowed German-Iranian Nahid Taghavi out of jail for medical treatment and released Iran-UK-US citizen Morad Tahbaz with an ankle bracelet. Both, however, remain unable to leave Iran, while a Polish citizen, Belgian, Swede and two French have joined those in prison.

Those behind bars include German national Jamshid Sharmahd who, according to his family, was abducted in the Gulf in July 2020 and now risks the death penalty in a trial expected to reach its conclusion in the next weeks.

"This is a framed job against him aimed at persecuting dissidents and journalists who use their freedom of speech in the free world," his daughter Gazelle Sharmahd told AFP.

"It is outrageous we let this happen," she said.



UN-backed Team Focusing on Human Rights in Palestinian Areas Announce Resignations

Chair of the Commission Navi Pillay delivers her statement of the report of the Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem, and Israel, during the 56th session of the Human Rights Council, at the European headquarters of the United Nations in Geneva, Switzerland, Wednesday, June 19, 2024. (Martial Trezzini/Keystone via AP, File)
Chair of the Commission Navi Pillay delivers her statement of the report of the Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem, and Israel, during the 56th session of the Human Rights Council, at the European headquarters of the United Nations in Geneva, Switzerland, Wednesday, June 19, 2024. (Martial Trezzini/Keystone via AP, File)
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UN-backed Team Focusing on Human Rights in Palestinian Areas Announce Resignations

Chair of the Commission Navi Pillay delivers her statement of the report of the Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem, and Israel, during the 56th session of the Human Rights Council, at the European headquarters of the United Nations in Geneva, Switzerland, Wednesday, June 19, 2024. (Martial Trezzini/Keystone via AP, File)
Chair of the Commission Navi Pillay delivers her statement of the report of the Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem, and Israel, during the 56th session of the Human Rights Council, at the European headquarters of the United Nations in Geneva, Switzerland, Wednesday, June 19, 2024. (Martial Trezzini/Keystone via AP, File)

A team of three independent experts working for the UN's top human rights body with a focus on Israel and Palestinian areas say they are resigning, citing personal reasons and a need for change, in the panel's first such group resignation.

The resignations, announced Monday by the UN-backed Human Rights Council that set up the team, come as violence continues in Palestinian areas with few signs of letup in the Israeli military campaign against Hamas and other militants behind the Oct. 7 attacks.

The Israeli government has repeatedly criticized the panel of experts, known as the Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory and Israel, and denied their repeated requests to travel to the region or otherwise cooperate with the team, The AP news reported.

Council spokesman Pascal Sim said the move marked the first joint resignations of Commission of Inquiry members since the council was founded in 2006. The team said in a statement that the resignations had “absolutely nothing to do with any external event or pressure," while also saying they provided a good opportunity to reconstitute the panel.

Navi Pillay, 83, a former UN human rights chief who has led the commission for the last four years, said in a letter to the council president that she was resigning effective Nov. 3 because of “age, medical issues and the weight of several other commitments.”

In an interview, Pillay rejected accusations from critics who accused her of antisemitism or turning a blind eye to the Hamas attacks. She recalled how she worked closely with some Jewish lawyers in the fight against apartheid in her native South Africa and was invited to Israel as the UN rights chief from 2008 to 2014.

"Name-calling is not affecting me in any way,” she said by phone. “We have striven to remain independent. That’s what we are. We’re an independent panel. We don’t take sides ... We look at the evidence and see the direction it’s taking us.”

“People who accuse us of being anti-Semitic ... they twist the facts, they invent facts, falsify facts. I would like to see them challenge the report: Which of the facts that we have set out are incorrect?” she said.

Her commission condemned the Oct. 7 attacks three days afterward in a news release that said at the time that reports "that armed groups from Gaza have gunned down hundreds of unarmed civilians are abhorrent and cannot be tolerated. Taking civilian hostages and using civilians as human shields are war crimes.”

She expressed regret that Israel didn't allow the commission access to Israel or Palestinian areas, saying "I feel that’s an injustice to Israeli Jews because we’re not taking on board their opinion or what they’re saying.”

Pillay said she had been recently diagnosed with low platelet count and her condition has restricted her ability to travel.

Her team said it wanted to give the rights council's president — currently Ambassador Jürg Lauber of Switzerland — the ability to pick new members.

Team member Chris Sidoti said Pillay's retirement marked “an appropriate time to re-constitute the commission.” The third member, Miloon Kothari, did not provide his reasons in a letter announcing his resignation effective 0ct. 31.

Neither the independent experts nor the council have any power over countries, but aim to spotlight rights abuses and collect information about suspected perpetrators that could be used by the International Criminal Court or other courts focusing on international justice.

The letters were sent to the council president last week but only became public Monday.

Last week, the US government announced sanctions against another independent expert mandated by the council, Francesca Albanese, who has also focused on Israel and the Palestinians. Albanese has accused Israel of genocide against the Palestinians, a claim Israel has denied.

Albanese said in an interview last week with The Associated Press that she was shocked by the US decision. She has not resigned.