In Their Own Words: Human Rights Violations against Iran’s Kurdish Minority

Although armed opposition groups do exist in Iran’s Kurdish region, many of the targets of government repression are peaceful activists operating within the framework of the law who are indiscriminately subjected to intimidation, torture and the deprivation of their rights to due process.

As part of its on-going effort to document human rights violations perpetrated against Iran’s Kurdish minority, the Iran Human Rights Documentation Center (IHRDC) has compiled a package of witness statements that evidences the abuses against Kurdish activists in the prisons, detention centers, and judicial apparatus of the Islamic Republic. The fifteen witnesses in this package were interviewed in the course of investigations for IHRDC’s recently released report, “On the Margins: Arrest, Imprisonment, and Execution of Kurdish Activists in Iran Today” and include former Kurdish Iranian political prisoners and the relatives of current and former death row inmates. All the witnesses included in this release have intimate experience with government violations of the basic rights of prisoners.

*Pictured: Nasser Golparipour’s son Habib Golparipour