5/31/2011 Iran's leadership guilty of crimes against...
Iran's leadership guilty of crimes against humanity
June 8, 2010
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Iran 's Supreme Leader, Au Khamenei, former December 24, 2010
President A u Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, recent Iran Cannot Hide the Truth Behind
presidential candidate Mir Hossein Moussavi, and a Sakineh
number of sifting and retired judges and officials, December 10, 2010
including former head of the Supreme Court,
Abdolkarim Mousavi Ardebili, are all liable to arrest Iran: A Reflection on the Death Penalty
under international law for complicity in the murder of and a Failed Anti-Narcotic Campaign
thousands of political prisoners at the end of the October 31, 2010
Iran/Iraq War. This is the conctusion of a 145-page
report by Geoffrey Robertson QC, who urges the Iran's Interrupted Lives
Security Council to set up a special court, along the October 1, 2010
lines of the International Tribunals for Yugoslavia and Three Iranian human rights activists
Rwanda, to try these men “for one of the worst single receive the Lech Walesa Prize
human rights atrocities since the Second World War”. September 29, 2009
The report concludes that the leaders were guilty of Terror in Buenos Aires : The Islamic
implementing a fatvka issued by Ayatollah Khomeini in Republic's Foraotten Crime Against
July 1988, which sentenced thousands of political Humanity
prisoners to death without a trial. At Tehran's notorious July 18, 2009
Evin Prison and twenty other prisons throughout Iran,
dissidents who had previously been sentenced to Authorization Denied: The high cost of
various prison terms and had refused to recant their the public expression of dissent in Iran
religious beliefs were blindfolded and paraded before July 9, 2009
judges who directed thousands to the gallows. “They
were hung from cranes, four at a time, or in groups of Neither Free Nor Fair, Elections in the
six from ropes hanging from the stage of the prison Islamic Republic of Iran
assembly hall. Their bodies were doused with June 12, 2009
disinfectant, packed in refrigerated trucks, and buried Thirty Years A o in Iran
by night in mass graves, the locations of which are still February 11, 2009
withheld from their families.”
>> And more.. .
Mr Robertson concludes that the leaders of Iran
planned for this “final solution” when it became clear
that they would have to accept a truce with Iraq. Death Visit the Human Rights and
committees (a religious judge, a prosecutor and an Democracy Library
intelligence official) were sent to prisons to arrange the
extermination of steadfast sympathizers of Mojahedin International Human Rights
Khalq Organization. Then came the turn of the Organizations' Reports on Human Rights
Marxists and atheists who were born in Muslim Abuses in Iran
families and were declared apostates. The men were Testimonies of Victims and Perpetrators
hanged and the women were tortured until they of Human Rights Abuses in Iran
iran rights.org/engl ish/newsletter-14.ph p 1/3
5/31/2011 Iran's leadership guilty of crimes against...
repented. Iran's Pro-democracy Voices
The evidence set out in the report shows that the >> And more.. .
victims were killed because of their beliefs about
religion — because they were atheists or because they
were Muslims who opposed the Ayatollah's version of
Islam (the “Guardianship of the Jurist”) that had been
adopted by the theocratic state. Mr Robertson points
out that the crime of genocide includes the destruction
of groups because of their religious beliefs or non-
beliefs and that those who implemented the fatvka,
which directed the extermination of prisoners because
of their different religious beliefs, were committing
genocide. The significance of this finding is that it
would give the international community a legal basis
for arresting many of the present leadership of Iran.
The report uncovers official statements justifying the
slaughter and identifies those present leaders who are
suspected of participating in its implementation and
cover-up. The best known are the current Supreme
Leader, Ayatollah A u Khamenei, and Hojatoleslam AJi
Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, Commander of the Armed
Forces at the time, who would have dispatched the
killing squads. The report uncovers hitherto unknown
statements by Mir Hossein Moussavi justifying the
action, the then Prime Minister and now one of the
leaders of the reform movement. Mr Robertson says
“he has not given any account of his role at the time, or
his reaction to it today, although he is frequently asked.
His statements at the time were part of the cover-up”.
Mr. Robertson names other currently powerful judges
as being complicit in the killings. He says that the
scale and cold-bloodedness of these killings, and the
fact that they were carefully planned, makes them of
greater infamy that the slaughter at Srebrenica and the
allied prisoner death marches by Japan at the end of
World War II.
The report accuses Tehran of continuing to deny
relatives of the victims their right to know where their
loved ones are buried. Some months after they were
killed, the families were given plastic bags containing
their belongings, but were refused all information about
their burial places. The location of mass graves has
been established in Tehran's cemetery area, but
attempts by families to gather there to mourn on
anniversaries of the massacre have been dispersed
by the authorities.
The situation in Iran today, the report argues, illustrates
the consequences of impunity for crimes against
humanity that have never been properly investigated or
acknowledged. Some of the leaders who engaged in
iran rights.org/engl ish/newsletter-14.ph p 2/3
5/31/2011 Iran's leadership guilty of crimes against...
such a level of lawlessness and barbarity against their
own people and their acolytes remain in powerful
positions in the judiciary and the state, whose
Supreme Leader AJi Khamenei has in the past year
called upon the Revolutionary Guards to use violence
against peaceful protests. “Those staged television
show trials of the 1980s, with televised ‘confessions'
by leftist prisoners wracked by torture and fear for their
families, writes Geoffrey Robertson, re-emerged in
2009, this time featuring ‘Green Movement' reformists
confessing to participation in an international
conspiracy. Once again, dissidents are being
prosecuted for being moharebs (“warriors against
God”) and some are being sentenced to death”.
Mr Robertson argues that the Security Council has the
power and the duty to set up a special court to
prosecute those responsible for the massacre
“because there is no statute of limitations on crimes
against humanity”.
The inquiry was conducted for the Washington-based
Abdorrahman Boroumand Foundation, an NGO
concerned with human rights and democracy in Iran.
Copyright © 2011, Abdorrahman Boroumand Foundation t Back to top
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