Iran, top executing country in MENA region

Iranian authorities continued to repress their own people.  At least 246 executions were carried out in 2020, thereby Iran retained its place as the top executing country in the Middle East and North Africa and the second worldwide after China, according to Amnesty International.

Iran’s judiciary should stay an execution order against political prisoner Heydar (or Heidar) Ghorbani, who was tortured and sentenced to death without a lawyer, and grant him a case review, the Center for Human Rights in Iran (CHRI) said in a statement.

“Executions based on forced confessions extracted under torture and after trials without legal representation are murder, not justice,” said CHRI Executive Director Hadi Ghaemi.

“Severe due process violations urgently warrant a judicial review of this case,” Ghaemi added.

Ghorbani, 48, a member of Iran’s Kurdish ethnic minority group, was arrested with two other men in October 2016 following the killing of several Revolutionary Guard members in the city of Kamyaran, Kurdistan Province, in northwestern Iran.

During his trial, Ghorbani denied the charges, arguing that he was not a member of a Kurdish political organization and never even had a weapon when the victims were killed.

Ghorbani was initially sentenced to 90 years in prison and 200 lashes for “assisting in intentional murder” and “membership and collaboration” with the Kurdish Democratic Party of Iran (KDPI), a political opposition group that the Iranian government has banned.

Former inmates, their families, and human rights activists have long complained of mistreatment and torture at Evin prison, a notorious facility in Tehran that is a primary site for political detainees.

Regular detainees, as well as surviving political prisoners and other perceived enemies of Iran's post-revolutionary regime, have alleged torture and other abuse inside its concrete walls to extract coerced confessions, sometimes televised, that are then used to condemn them publicly.

Several former prisoners have said that the released footage, which appears to have come from the prison’s surveillance cameras, shows the public wards of the Evin prison rather than the section controlled by the feared intelligence branch of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), where prisoners are reportedly routinely subjected to physical and psychological torture.

Amnesty International called the leak of the videos "showing appalling abuse of prisoners" a "rare glimpse" of such violence in Iran and "a chilling reminder of the impunity granted to prison officials in Iran who subject those in their custody to torture and other cruel, inhumane, and degrading treatment."