These crimes included persecution on the grounds of gender — a criminal offense in opposition to humanity — which intersected with discrimination on the premise of ethnicity and faith, the report mentioned.
Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old Kurdish girl, was arrested in Tehran on Sept. 13, 2022, for allegedly carrying “improper” hijab, referring to the strict Islamic gown code that Iran enforces on girls. Her demise days later sparked mass protests underneath the slogan “Girls, Life, Freedom,” which quickly broadened into wider expressions of dissent in opposition to the Iranian authorities and Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme chief.
In a assertion printed Saturday on the Iranian Overseas 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 info.” The mission mentioned 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 problems arising from Ms. Amini’s surgical procedure in childhood may be excluded because the quick explanation for her demise,” the report mentioned, including “the mission has cheap grounds to imagine that her demise was caused 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 demise,” the report mentioned. “On that foundation, the State bears duty for her illegal demise.”
As a substitute of investigating the circumstances of her demise, authorities “took energetic steps to obfuscate the reality” and used judicial harassment and intimidation to silence her relations and stop them from searching 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 demise, have been arrested and later imprisoned, it added.
The actual fact-finding mission used official Iranian statements and stories, in-depth interviews with victims and eyewitnesses, medical imaging, verified photographs, and video and satellite tv for pc imagery, the report mentioned.
The Washington Put up has not independently reviewed the supply supplies utilized by the mission.
Iran hasn’t issued complete statistics in regards to the protests, however the report mentioned a “credible determine” for the demise toll in the course of the protests was 551 individuals, together with as much as 49 girls and 68 youngsters, whereas tens of hundreds of others are believed to have been arrested.
“The mission acknowledges that safety forces have been killed and injured and located situations of violence by protesters,” the mission mentioned, 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 happened after Friday prayers, the report mentioned.
The report additionally discovered that Iranian safety forces carried out illegal and extrajudicial killings in a “sample of using deadly pressure by the safety forces in opposition to protesters.”
Most deaths concerned using firearms, it mentioned. Some protesters and bystanders have been totally 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, using electrical shocks and rape, the report mentioned. It added that it discovered a number of instances the place people died in custody on account of torture.
Judges presiding over instances involving protesters relied on confessions obtained underneath torture and “confirmed manifest bias,” the report mentioned. 9 protesters have been executed, it mentioned, “whereas a minimum of one other 6 males reportedly remained underneath sentence of demise, with some susceptible to imminent execution on the time of writing.”
Shaheen Sardar Ali, a member of the fact-finding mission, mentioned in a press release: “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 Girl, 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 Reality Discovering Mission proceed its necessary work.”