By Pooya Stone
The Iranian Supreme Court upheld the death sentence against political prisoner Heydar Ghorbani on Thursday and his case has been transferred to the Prosecutor’s Office in Sanandaj, capital of Kurdistan province, for his execution to be carried out.
He was arrested in 2016 by the Ministry of Intelligence and Security (MOIS) agents and placed under torture at Sanandaj Central Prison. He has now been moved to death row.
The Iranian Resistance has urged the United Nations Secretary-General, High Commissioner for Human Rights, and Human Rights Council, as well as any other international human rights organizations to stop Ghorbani’s execution.
The regime, facing a multitude of crises have resorted to executions in an attempt to maintain a climate of fear, with the hope of staving off further protests. They executed protester Mostafa Salehi, 30, last Wednesday on the charge of “leading the riots of Kahrizsang district in the city of Najafabad” in Isfahan in the December 2017 protests, something that he only admitted to under torture and has denied whenever he was not under torture.
The Iranian Resistance said that now, more than ever before, the international community must send a fact-finding mission to the regime’s prisons to inspect the conditions and interview inmates, especially political prisoners.
They wrote: “The religious fascism ruling Iran should be strongly condemned and isolated by the international community for its continued use of torture and arbitrary executions, especially against political prisoners, and the gross and systematic violation of human rights across the country… The regime of Iran is notoriously renowned for making up scenarios and extracting forced confessions from political prisoners to justify their execution.”
Maryam Rajavi, the president of the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI), condemned Salehi’s execution, describing it as an attempt to “terrorize the public and fend off popular upheavals”, before urging the international community to condemn the execution too and take measures to protect political prisoners.
Just over two weeks ago, an international social media campaign that used the hashtag #اعدام-نکنید or “don not execute,” was successful in preventing the executions of three young men – Amir Hossein Moradi, Saied Tamjidi, and Mohammad Rajabi – arrested for protesting during the November 2019 uprising.
Their trial was held in January, with Amnesty International calling it “grossly unfair” owing to the fact that the confession from 25-year-old Moradi was extracted under brutal torture, which means that it wasn’t a real confession at all.
Read More:
What Do We Know About the Case of 5 Young Iran People Sentenced to Death?
