A gaggle of former United Nations officers and specialists have penned an open letter urging the United Nations human rights workplace to analyze Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi‘s involvement within the mass killing of political prisoners.
“We imagine it’s lengthy overdue for the Workplace of the UN Excessive Commissioner for Human Rights Michelle Bachelet to analyze the 1988 bloodbath,” read the letter signed by dozens of human rights teams and greater than 450 individuals.
Following the tip of the Iran-Iraq Battle in 1988, Supreme Chief Ruhollah Khomeini appointed Raisi to a four-man “dying fee” that helped facilitate the purge of perceived dissidents from Iran’s jails. Amnesty Worldwide estimates greater than 5,000 prisoners, a majority of them affiliated with the Folks’s Mujahideen of Iran dissident group, have been killed throughout 32 cities.
The letter describes “hundreds of political prisoners who refused to desert their beliefs have been executed. The victims have been buried in mass graves scattered all through the nation.”
The letter was organized by the London-based Justice for the Victims of the 1988 Bloodbath in Iran. The advocacy group’s director, Tahar Boumedra, mentioned at a press convention in London on Thursday that the letter represented historical past’s largest worldwide enchantment for the UN to carry Iran accountable over the bloodbath.
Raisi, a former judiciary chief below US sanctions, received Iran’s presidential election in a landslide in June. Amnesty International has beforehand known as for Raisi to be investigated for “his involvement in previous and ongoing crimes below worldwide regulation.”
Javaid Rehman, the UN’s particular rapporteur on the state of affairs of human rights in Iran, mentioned in June that his workplace is keen to share testimonies and proof collected on the Iranian executions with the UN Human Rights Council or some other investigative physique.
Raisi has lengthy dismissed his involvement within the mass killings. Reuters quotes him as telling a information convention in June 2021: “If a decide, a prosecutor has defended the safety of the individuals, he must be praised. … I’m proud to have defended human rights in each place I’ve held thus far.”
Along with Raisi, the letter additionally names head of judiciary Gholam Hossein Mohseni Ejei as one of many perpetrators who “proceed[s] to get pleasure from impunity.”
The signatories of Thursday’s letter mentioned they have been “involved that lack of accountability for the perpetrators by the worldwide neighborhood might embolden the Iranian authorities.” The letter references Iran’s lethal crackdown on peaceable nationwide protests in 2019, which reportedly left a whole lot lifeless.
