According to Amnesty International Iran prisons has turned into killing field for prisoners. Iranian authorities have executed at least 173 this year after systematically unfair trials, nearly three times more than this time last year, Amnesty International said.
Diana Eltahawy, Amnesty International’s Deputy Director for the Middle East and North Africa said, “States and intergovernmental bodies must condemn the Iranian authorities, in the strongest terms, for these arbitrary executions, call for an official moratorium on all executions, send representatives to visit prisoners sentenced to death, and seek attendance at trials involving capital crimes. Given the crisis of impunity for mass arbitrary executions, they must also urgently pursue meaningful pathways for accountability.”
This year, the authorities have also significantly increased the number of overall executions for all crimes, with at least 282 people executed in total so far in 2023 – this is nearly double the number of executions that were recorded at the beginning of June last year. If the authorities continue to carry out overall executions at this alarming pace, they could kill nearly a thousand prisoners by the end of this year.
Rising number of executions
Also on June 9, 2023, in a continuation of the disturbing trend of prisoner executions, the Iranian government hanged Jafar Mohammadpour, Ghobad Farhadi, and another prisoner today at Urmia Prison. On june 8, Houshang Amiri Zadeh met the same fate at Qazvin Central Prison, while Ali-Doust Barahoui faced execution at Zahedan Prison. On Wednesday, June 6th, two Baluch compatriots named Malek Baluch Mahani and Kambeez Barzkar were executed at Kerman Prison, and Einollah Badri Nezhad and Jalal Bazgir met their demise at Karaj Central Prison at the hands of judicial executioners.
The transfer of death row convicts to solitary cells for the implementation of sentences is an ongoing practice. Most recently, on Friday, a female prisoner named Parvin Mousavi, along with two others, were moved to solitary cells at Urmia Prison. Similarly, on Tuesday, three prisoners were relocated to solitary confinement at Shiraz Prison. It has been reported that the regime’s judiciary recently delivered a list of 50 death row prisoners to Kerman Prison for sentence implementation.
The Iranian communities across Europe criticized, the lack of action by the international community in response to the escalating wave of executions serves as an incentive for this regime to persist in its crimes against humanity. It is necessary that the the United Nations, the European Union, and member countries take immediate and decisive measures to save the lives of death row prisoners and to hold the Iranian regime leaders accountable for four decades of crimes against humanity and against the people of Iran.