Iranians living in Turkey take part in a rally in support of the protesters, in Yalova, Turkey, on Jan. 16.Dilara Senkaya/Reuters
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. He was the civil society representative at the UN Human Rights Council Special Session on Iran on Jan. 23.
Imagine a mother and father, sifting among countless black plastic body bags dumped like garbage on the floor of a morgue, and finding one young victim after another mutilated by bullet wounds, in search of their missing teenage child whose only “crime” was to protest in the streets for a better future.
Now imagine that the mourning parents are forced to pay thousands of dollars to retrieve the body of their loved one for a dignified burial, or sign a confession that the victim was killed by imaginary “terrorists,” rather than the assault rifles used by security forces to massacre defenceless crowds, to execute orders from a Supreme Leader who claims to speak on behalf of God.
These are the scenes from hell that countless Iranians have confronted over the past few days, amidst an internet blackout aimed at repressing the truth.
The scale of the killings is staggering. According to records gathered by Iranian medical staff in hospitals, clinics, and morgues across the country, more than 30,000 people may have been killed between Jan. 8 and Jan. 23, with three times that number seriously injured. That is a conservative estimate, and the killings haven’t stopped. Accounts have emerged of morgues running out of body bags and simply dumping victims in mass graves, and of bodies being transported to burial grounds in refrigerated trucks used for transporting meat.
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Based on these numbers, this would be the largest mass killing in the history of contemporary Iran; it would be no exaggeration to call it an extermination. By comparison, during the notorious Srebrenica genocide in 1995, some 8,000 Bosnian Muslims were killed over a period of 20 days. In Iran, the estimates are that at least four times that number have been killed in about half the time. The shocking scale would compare with the Babyn Yar massacre in Ukraine during the Holocaust, in which more than 33,000 Jews were executed by Nazi soldiers.
The 1945 Nuremberg Charter for the prosecution of Nazi leaders defined such horrors as crimes against humanity. And today, millions of Iranians across the world are demanding that those most responsible for this radical evil among the Islamic Republic’s leadership be brought to justice, just as prominent Nazis were at Nuremberg after the Second World War. Such crimes demand accountability, and the international community must stand with the people of Iran in pursuit of justice.
Following the violent repression of the “Woman, Life, Liberty” feminist uprising in 2022, the UN Human Rights Council established an international fact-finding mission to investigate what qualified as crimes against humanity. At an emergency session of the Council last week, the mandate of the mission was extended to investigate the most recent crimes “for potential future legal proceedings.”
Protesters participate in a demonstration in Berlin in support of the nationwide mass protests in Iran on Jan. 10.Ebrahim Noroozi/The Associated Press
But unsurprisingly, the Islamic Republic is not a party to the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court. The only way to establish the Court’s jurisdiction is for the UN Security Council to make a binding referral under Chapter 7 of the UN Charter. That is not likely to happen, because any resolution would be vetoed by permanent members for political reasons. However, such a session should be held as a matter of principle – at least to show the people of Iran that the world community stands with them in this hour of darkness.
Ultimately, it will be independent and impartial courts in a future democratic Iran that will prosecute those most responsible for these unspeakable crimes. Justice is the only remedy for impunity and imposed amnesia. It is the central ingredient of any meaningful transformation to a country governed by the rule of law and respect for fundamental human rights.
The people of Iran, whether within the country or in the diaspora, are in a state of deep trauma, and the prospect of war makes matters even worse. There is seemingly no end in sight for this nightmare of pain and suffering. But we are an ancient and resilient people who have survived through the ages. The dawn always comes after the darkest moment of the night.
The day will come when we will dance in the streets and celebrate our freedom. And on that day, we will remember those who stood with us in our hour of need.