Iranian Justice System Continues Pattern Of Killing And Torture

(New York, N.Y.) — On Monday, UN independent investigators on human rights released data stating that in 2020 the Islamic Republic of Iran executed more than 250 people, including at least four children, and has so far carried out 230 executions in 2021. The report follows the news reports that Iranian human rights lawyer Payam Derafshan was the victim of torture while imprisoned, including being drugged at the notoriously brutal Evin Prison and suffering consequent convulsions during which he bit off part of his tongue, and then undergoing electric shock ‘treatment’ at a psychiatric hospital. This week, Iran also imposed a new term of imprisonment on Iranian-British hostage Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe for “spreading propaganda against the regime.”

United Against Nuclear Iran (UANI)'s resource Cruel and Inhuman: Executions and Other Barbarities In Iran's Judicial System highlights Iranian use of capital punishment through numbers, noting that the regime’s executions account for 53 percent of recorded ones worldwide, and that it executes more people per capita than any other country. Included in the 2020 executions were those of three child offenders. Earlier this year, UN officials reported Iran has “more than 85 juvenile offenders on death row.” The execution of juveniles violates the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, to which Iran is a signatory. 

Tehran continues to target political dissidents and ethnic, religious, and sexual minorities for execution, and takes Americans and other Westerners—particularly dual nationals—hostage to extract geopolitical concessions from other countries. On November 4, 2021—42 years to the day after the Iranian regime overran the U.S. Embassy in Tehran and took Americans hostage – UANI will feature a panel discussion at its annual UANI Summit with UANI Advisory Board member Governor Bill Richardson, Senator Ben Cardin, and former hostages including U.S. Navy veteran Michael White, UANI Advisory Board member Barry Rosen, a survivor of the 1979-1981 hostage crisis, and Nizar Zakka, Lebanese national and U.S. resident who was imprisoned in Iran until 2019.

To read UANI’s resource Cruel and Inhuman: Executions and Other Barbarities in Iran’s Judicial System, please click here.

To read UANI’s profile of Iranian hostage and British-Iranian citizen Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, please click here. 

To read UANI’s resource American and Western Hostages, please click here.

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