These crimes included persecution on the grounds of gender — a criminal offense towards humanity — which intersected with discrimination on the idea 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 carrying “improper” hijab, referring to the strict Islamic costume code that Iran enforces on ladies. Her loss of life days later sparked mass protests below the slogan “Ladies, Life, Freedom,” which quickly broadened into wider expressions of dissent towards the Iranian authorities and Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme chief.
In a assertion printed Saturday on the Iranian International Ministry’s web site, spokesman Nasser Kanaani rejected what he described as “the unfounded allegations on this report, that are based mostly on false and biased data.” The mission stated it “regrets the shortage of significant cooperation by the Iranian authorities” over the investigation.
The report, ready for the U.N. Human Rights Council, rejected Iranian authorities’ earlier claims that Amini died of a medical situation from childhood.
“Primarily based on the proof, alleged issues arising from Ms. Amini’s surgical procedure in childhood will be excluded because the quick reason for her loss of life,” the report stated, including “the mission has cheap grounds to imagine that her loss of life was led to by exterior causes.”
The mission had “established the existence of proof of trauma to Ms. Amini’s physique, inflicted whereas within the custody of the morality police” and “is happy that Ms. Amini was subjected to bodily violence that led to her loss of life,” the report stated. “On that foundation, the State bears accountability for her illegal loss of life.”
As a substitute of investigating the circumstances of her loss of life, authorities “took lively steps to obfuscate the reality” and used judicial harassment and intimidation to silence her members of the family and stop them from looking for authorized motion, in response to the report. The household’s lawyer, in addition to a number of journalists who first reported on Amini’s loss of life, have been arrested and later imprisoned, it added.
The actual 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 Submit has not independently reviewed the supply supplies utilized by the mission.
Iran hasn’t issued complete statistics concerning the protests, however the report stated a “credible determine” for the loss of life toll in the course of the protests was 551 individuals, together with as much as 49 ladies and 68 youngsters, whereas tens of 1000’s of others are believed to have been arrested.
“The mission acknowledges that safety forces have been killed and injured and located cases of violence by protesters,” the mission stated, noting that the Iranian authorities portrayed the protesters as rioters, however “the massive majority of protests have been peaceable.”
The best variety of deaths have been recorded in areas with minority populations, together with in Sistan and Baluchistan province, the place 104 individuals have been killed in a single day on Sept. 30, 2022, throughout protests that came about after Friday prayers, the report stated.
The report additionally discovered that Iranian safety forces carried out illegal and extrajudicial killings in a “sample of the usage of deadly pressure by the safety forces towards protesters.”
Most deaths concerned the usage of firearms, it stated. Some protesters and bystanders have been absolutely or partially blinded by safety forces, the mission discovered, including that it’s “happy” that the accidents, which “completely marked the victims, primarily ‘branding’ them as protesters,” have been supposed to function a deterrent to others.
Detainees — together with youngsters — have been additionally “subjected to extreme bodily, psychological and sexual torture,” together with beatings, burnings, the usage of electrical shocks and rape, the report stated. It added that it discovered a number of circumstances the place people died in custody because of torture.
Judges presiding over circumstances involving protesters relied on confessions obtained below torture and “confirmed manifest bias,” the report stated. 9 protesters have been executed, it stated, “whereas at the very least one other 6 males reportedly remained below sentence of loss of life, with some vulnerable to imminent execution on the time of writing.”
Shaheen Sardar Ali, a member of the fact-finding mission, stated in an announcement: “We urge the Iranian authorities to halt all executions and instantly and unconditionally launch all individuals arbitrarily arrested and detained within the context of the protests, and to finish the repression of protesters, their households and supporters of the Lady, Life, Freedom motion.”
Abram Paley, the U.S. deputy particular envoy for Iran, wrote on social media that the “complete world is taking discover” of the report, including: “It’s crucial that the Truth Discovering Mission proceed its vital work.”
