Iran dedicated crimes towards humanity throughout protest crackdown, U.N. report says | EUROtoday

These crimes included persecution on the grounds of gender — against the law towards humanity — which intersected with discrimination on the premise of ethnicity and faith, the report stated.

Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old Kurdish lady, was arrested in Tehran on Sept. 13 2022 for allegedly sporting “improper” hijab, referring to the strict Islamic costume code that Iran enforces on girls. Her dying days later sparked mass protests underneath the slogan “Women, Life, Freedom,” which quickly broadened into wider expressions of dissent towards the Iranian authorities and Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme chief.

In an announcement revealed Saturday on the Iranian Foreign Ministry’s web site, spokesman Nasser Kanaani rejected what he described as “the unfounded allegations in this report, which are based on false and biased information.” The mission stated it “regrets the lack of meaningful cooperation by the Iranian authorities” over the investigation.

A 12 months after Mahsa Amini’s dying: Repression and defiance in Iran

The report, ready for the U.N. Human Rights Council, rejected Iranian authorities’ earlier claims that Amini died of a medical situation from childhood.

“Based on the evidence, alleged complications arising from Ms. Amini’s surgery in childhood can be excluded as the immediate cause of her death,” the report stated, including “the mission has reasonable grounds to believe that her death was brought about by external causes.”

The mission had “established the existence of evidence of trauma to Ms. Amini’s body, inflicted while in the custody of the morality police” and “is satisfied that Ms. Amini was subjected to physical violence that led to her death,” the report stated. “On that basis, the State bears responsibility for her unlawful death.”

Instead of investigating the circumstances of her dying, authorities “took active steps to obfuscate the truth” and used judicial harassment and intimidation to silence her household and forestall them from looking for authorized motion, in keeping with the report. The household’s lawyer, in addition to a number of journalists who first reported on Amini’s dying, had been arrested and later imprisoned, it added.

The fact-finding mission used official Iranian statements and studies, in-depth interviews with victims and eyewitnesses, medical imaging, verified images and video and satellite tv for pc imagery, the report stated.

The Washington Post has not independently reviewed the supply supplies utilized by the mission.

Iran hasn’t issued complete statistics in regards to the protests, however the report stated a “credible figure” for the dying toll through the protests was 551 individuals, together with as much as 49 girls and 68 youngsters, whereas tens of 1000’s of others are believed to have been arrested.

“The mission acknowledges that security forces were killed and injured and found instances of violence by protesters,” the mission stated, noting that the Iranian authorities portrayed the protesters as rioters, however “the large majority of protests were peaceful.”

The highest variety of deaths had been recorded in areas with minority populations, together with in Sistan and Baluchistan province, the place 104 individuals had been killed in a single day on Sept. 30, 2022, throughout protests that occurred after Friday prayers, the report stated.

‘Bloody Friday’: Witnesses describe the deadliest crackdown in Iran protests

The report additionally discovered that Iranian safety forces carried out illegal and extrajudicial killings in a “pattern of the use of lethal force by the security forces against protesters.”

Most deaths concerned using firearms, it stated. Some protesters and bystanders had been totally or partially blinded by safety forces, the mission discovered, including that it’s “satisfied” that the accidents, which “permanently marked the victims, essentially ‘branding’ them as protesters,” had been meant to function a deterrent to others.

Detainees — together with youngsters — had been additionally “subjected to severe physical, psychological and sexual torture,” together with beatings, burnings, using electrical shocks and rape, the report stated. It added that it discovered a number of instances the place people died in custody on account of torture.

Judges presiding over instances involving protesters relied on confessions obtained underneath torture and “showed manifest bias,” the report stated. Nine protesters have been executed, it stated, “while at least another 6 men reportedly remained under sentence of death, with some at risk of imminent execution at the time of writing.”

At the center of Iran’s crackdown, a small group of judges sentences protesters to hold

Shaheen Sardar Ali, a member of the Fact-Finding Mission, stated in an announcement: “We urge the Iranian authorities to halt all executions and immediately and unconditionally release all persons arbitrarily arrested and detained in the context of the protests, and to end the repression of protesters, their families and supporters of the Woman, Life, Freedom movement.”

U.S. Deputy Special Envoy Abram Paley wrote on social media that the “whole world is taking notice” of the report, including: “It is imperative that the Fact Finding Mission continue its important work.”