Iran’s ‘crimes against humanity’ must be prosecuted: UN experts

GENEVA: UN experts on Monday called for the prosecution of Iranian officials who may have committed crimes against humanity during a 2022 crackdown on demonstrations that particularly targeted ethnic and religious minorities.

The UN Human Rights Council mandated experts to carry out an investigation on Iran following nationwide protests triggered by the September 2022 death in police custody of Mahsa Amini.

Amini, a 22-year-old Iranian Kurd, was arrested for allegedly violating the Islamic republic´s strict dress code for women. Several hundred people, including members of the security forces, were killed and thousands arrested during the demonstrations.

“There are no viable routes” for justice to be served in Iran, experts said in the report published Monday. Iranian authorities refused to participate in the investigation.

The experts called on all UN member states to “apply the principle of universal jurisdiction to prosecute Iranian officials responsible for crimes under international law, including crimes against humanity”. Violations of the rights of minorities “were amplified”, and the experts found that “many of these violations amounted to crimes against humanity”, according to their report.

In a statement issued on Monday, they said they had found that “the crime against humanity of persecution on gender grounds intersected with persecution on ethnic and religious grounds”.

It added: “Ethnic and religious minorities in Iran, in particular Kurd and Baluch minorities, have been disproportionally impacted by the Government´s crackdown on protesters since 2022, the direct result of long-standing discrimination.”

Since widespread protests began, the rights group said executions had increased “particularly in minority areas,” with several death sentences recently being handed down to ethnic minority women.

Many of the serious human rights violations documented by the experts include “unnecessary use of lethal force, arbitrary arrests, torture, rape, enforced disappearances and gender persecution.”