Protesters participate in a demonstration in Berlin on Saturday in support of the protests in Iran against the country's government.Ebrahim Noroozi/The Associated Press
Shirin Ebadi is the founder of the Defenders of Human Rights Centre in Iran and recipient of the 2003 Nobel Peace Prize.
Payam Akhavan is the Human Rights Chair at the University of Toronto’s Massey College, a founder of the Iran Human Rights Documentation Centre, and a former UN prosecutor at The Hague.
The long-suffering people of Iran are at a critical historical juncture. Since the Islamic Republic’s inception 47 years ago, their government has responded to their demands for freedom and prosperity with executions, imprisonment and torture. In 2022, it was the murder of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini for failing to properly wear the hijab that sparked the Woman, Life, Liberty movement – an unprecedented feminist uprising in the Middle East that was extinguished with violent repression. But the fire of discontent has continued to smoulder under the ashes.
In the first days of 2026, it has once again flared, this time in the despair of economic catastrophe and widespread corruption that has brought impoverished millions to protest in the streets. Again, the response has been ruthless beatings and snipers killing from the rooftops, a vicious war against the people with horrific but all-too-predictable scenes of youth crying for freedom while covered in blood, and mourning families wailing over the bodies of their loved ones in morgues.
The shutdown of the country’s internet and telephone networks is an ominous sign that, in order to ensure their survival, the authorities may be resorting to the large-scale massacre of Iranians amid an information blackout.
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In view of this onslaught, silence is not prudence; it is permission to murder with impunity. And so, as this ordeal unfolds, the world must stand with the courageous people of Iran in their heroic struggle for liberation and a better future.
The policy of violent repression comes from the very top of the Islamic Republic’s leadership. Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and other senior officials have ordered security forces to crush the protests “without leniency,” deeming protesters as “enemies of God,” a “crime” that carries the death sentence.
Amid the mounting body count, authorities have engaged in a familiar pattern of denial and silencing, ignoring the killings or blaming them on others while forcing the families of victims to make forced confessions on state-controlled media under threats of reprisals, including the burial of their loved ones in unmarked graves so they cannot even be mourned.
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One example of this ruthless repression is the attacks by security forces against hospitals where those wounded in the protests have been arrested, with many disappearing into Iran’s notorious torture chambers. A state that hunts the injured in hospital corridors has crossed a line that no society should accept, and that the world should not ignore. This is only one expression of the cruelty that has been made into a method of governance.
But when people are pushed too far, nothing can stand in their way – because they have nothing to lose.
The day is arriving when those responsible for these crimes against humanity will be held to account. Iran, too, will have its Nuremberg moment: a reckoning in the name of justice so the country can heal from the hatred and violence of the past.
Amid the geopolitical contests and conflicts in the Middle East, some continue to insist on the romantic myth that the Islamic Republic is somehow a defender of the oppressed, and that the protests are of foreign design. This ideological posture is difficult to reconcile with a government that has proven willing, time and time again, to shoot peaceful protesters whose only demand is to live in basic dignity. Whatever the interests of other nations, the priority must be to listen to the voices of the millions of Iranians risking their lives in the streets for a democratic future – one that would no doubt transform not just their anguished lives, but also help heal the bitter divisions and sectarian ideologies that have afflicted the wider region for so long.
The continuing heroism of the Iranian people is a reminder of the tremendous potential for the future of a rich civilization that produced the first human-rights declaration 2,500 years ago in the cuneiform text of clay cylinder of Cyrus the Great, which is now housed in the British Museum. The scenes unfolding in Iran today demonstrate that 50 years of totalitarianism has not extinguished this powerful legacy, expressed in the ancient belief that in the end, light will triumph over darkness. Now, the world community must support this awakening and stand in solidarity with those who remind us of the astonishing resilience of the human spirit.