Iran protests crackdown sparked ‘crimes against humanity’ — UN mission

Tehran’s violent crackdown on peaceful protests and discrimination against women and girls triggered serious rights violations, many amounting to crimes against humanity, a UN fact-finding mission concludes.

Iran was rocked by widespread demonstrations sparked by the September 2022 death of Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old Iranian Kurd who had been arrested for allegedly violating the strict dress rule for women based on Islamic sharia law.

Anger over her death rapidly expanded into weeks of taboo-breaking protests in an open challenge to the Islamic republic’s system of government under supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

In November 2022, the UN Human Rights Council created a high-level investigation into the deadly crackdown.

In its first report, the independent international fact-finding mission on Iran says many of the violations uncovered “amount to crimes against humanity — specifically those of murder, imprisonment, torture, rape and other forms of sexual violence, persecution, enforced disappearance and other inhumane acts.”

It adds that the commission of such crimes, in the context of a deprivation of fundamental rights and inflicted with discriminatory intent, “leads the mission to the conclusion that the crime against humanity of persecution on the grounds of gender has been committed.”