Prisons, Executions and Torture

Survival as the Ultimate Doctrine and the Ideological Elimination of Dissent

Since its inception in 1979, the Islamic Republic of Iran has engineered an infrastructure of fear to suppress domestic opposition and preserve its political framework. From a structural perspective, political repression within this system is not a temporary tool for managing crisis; it is a foundational pillar built directly into the constitutional and theological architecture of the state.

• The Ideology of Total Elimination: The official state ideology reframes political opposition as an existential, religious offense. Peaceful protests, civil society activism, and political dissent are routinely categorized under the Koranic concepts of Baghy (armed rebellion against a just Islamic ruler) and Mofsed-e-Filarz (corruption on Earth). By translating political dissent into a theological transgression, the state strips citizens of political agency and justifies total physical erasure as a religious obligation.
• The Doctrine of Regime Preservation: Rooted in the political jurisprudence popularized by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the doctrine states that "preserving the Islamic regime is the highest religious duty, superseding all other Islamic tenets." This framework allows the state to bypass its own constitutional protections, disregard international treaties, and deploy unrestricted physical violence against its populace whenever the political core feels threatened.
• Fluctuations in State Violence: The scale and visibility of state violence correspond directly to the regime’s domestic legitimacy. Over nearly five decades, whenever socioeconomic crises, structural inflation, and democratic demands have driven citizens into the streets—such as during the student protests of 1999, the Green Movement of 2009, the nationwide economic uprisings of 2017 and 2019, the "Woman, Life, Freedom" movement of 2022, and subsequent waves of unrest leading up to 2026—the security apparatus has responded by deploying mass arbitrary detentions, lethal street violence, and targeted executions to re-establish public fear and deter future mobilization [CHRI].

The Overlapping Domains of the IRGC, MOIS, and the Judiciary

The system of repression in Iran relies on a multi-layered, intentionally redundant security network. This overlapping design eliminates intelligence blind spots and diffuses institutional accountability, making it difficult for external human rights monitors to pinpoint individual blame.

The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) Intelligence Organization

Originally an external defense and ideological militia, the IRGC’s domestic Intelligence Organization (Sazman-e Ettela'at-e Sepah) has eclipsed civilian agencies to become Iran's primary instrument of domestic surveillance.

• Operates completely outside the oversight of the Iranian Parliament or civilian ministries.
• Directly targets political activists, dual nationals, environmentalists, and digital rights advocates.
• Maintains independent, highly restricted clandestine networks and designated security wards, most notably Ward 2-A of Evin Prison.

The Ministry of Intelligence (MOIS)

The MOIS (Vaja) serves as the institutional counterpart to the IRGC. While nominally answerable to the President and Parliament, the Ministry answers directly to the Supreme Leader.

• Manages a vast web of registered prisons and unregistered local safehouses (Bazdashtgah-haye Pelaak-daar).
• Specializes in deep psychological profiles, long-term ideological grooming, and forced confessions.
• Controls Ward 209 of Evin Prison, which acts as a processing hub for high-profile political prisoners.

The Judiciary as an Executive Arm

In political and national security cases, the Iranian Judiciary operates not as an independent branch for justice, but as the bureaucratic executor of the security state.

• Judges within the Revolutionary Court system are carefully vetted for ideological conformity.
• The Office of the Prosecutor coordinates directly with interrogators (Bazjouyan) from the IRGC and MOIS.
• Indictments, trial lengths, and final sentences are regularly dictated by security handlers before the defense ever takes the stand.

Systematic Human Rights Violations in Evin, Rajai Shahr, and Greater Tehran Prisons

Testimonies from torture survivors, documented human rights files, and UN special reports reveal a systematic pattern of physical, psychological, and gender-based violence inside Iranian detention facilities.

Physical Torture and the Violation of Bodily Integrity

Interrogators utilize calculated methods of physical abuse designed to inflict extreme agony without leaving immediate, easily photographable marks. These methods include:

• The "Chicken" Position (Joojeh): Binding the victim’s hands behind their knees and hanging them from a horizontal pipe, exposing the spinal column to severe dislocation.
• Systematic Flogging (Kabel-zani): Striking the soles of the feet repeatedly with heavy industrial cables, leading to tissue necrosis, severe infections, and prolonged immobility.
• Sleep Deprivation: Forcing detainees to remain awake for days at a time under constant bright neon lights, inducing auditory and visual hallucinations.

White Torture and Prolonged Solitary Confinement

Psychological torture is deployed systematically to force structural personality collapses ahead of public trials.

• Total Sensory Deprivation: Confining a prisoner to a tiny, windowless, completely white cell with no access to human contact, reading materials, or natural light for months on end.
• The Impact: This "white torture" destroys a prisoner's sense of time and space, leaving them highly susceptible to accepting fabricated national security charges during interrogation.

Sexual and Gender-Based Violence

Sexual humiliation is an institutionalized tool of interrogation rather than random misconduct.

• Assault and Threats: Rape, mock sexual assaults, and forced nudity are used against both female and male prisoners to shatter their social standing and religious sensitivities.
• Psychological Leverage: Threatening the sexual assault of a prisoner's spouse, daughters, or mother in adjacent rooms to break the ideological resolve of political dissidents.

Key Carceral Hubs

• Evin Prison (Tehran): The historic and symbolic center of political incarceration, housing the country's intellectual, political, and cultural opposition.
• Rajai Shahr Prison (Gohardشت): Historically used for extrajudicial executions and the containment of high-risk political prisoners alongside violent offenders (prior to its operational restructuring and clearing phases).
• Fashafuye / Greater Tehran Central Penitentiary: A massive complex built in a desert region south of Tehran, designed to hold thousands of protesters arrested during street demonstrations under overcrowded and unsanitary conditions.

Due Process Violations and Capital Punishment as Civil Control

The Islamic Republic of Iran remains one of the world's leading executioners per capita. The application of the death penalty serves primarily as an instrument of civil intimidation, engineered to shock the public during times of economic distress and social unrest [CHRI].

Vague and Elastic Charges

The legal code allows the state to apply capital punishment to wide swathes of non-violent or purely political behavior through broad legal terms:

Legal definitions: Islamic Penal Code (English translation), Articles 279 (Moharebeh), 286 (Efsad-e-fel-arz), and 287–288 (Baghy).

The Mechanism of Extorted Confessions

The state's legal framework allows judges to bypass standard evidentiary requirements, such as forensics, electronic tracking, or credible eyewitness testimony, by relying entirely on:

• The Doctrine of the Judge’s Knowledge (Elm-e-Qazi): This gives individual judges the subjective power to issue execution orders based on their personal intuition regarding the defendant's guilt.
• Forced Confessions: Self-incriminating statements extracted under severe torture are treated as definitive proof of guilt, even when retracted by the defendant in open court.

The 1988 Massacre and the Legacy of Structural Non-Accountability

The modern infrastructure of state violence in Iran cannot be separated from its historical precedents. The most severe incident of political mass murder occurred in the summer of 1988, establishing a culture of absolute impunity that continues to define state policy through 2026.

• The Inquisitions of Death: Following a secret fatwa issued by Ayatollah Khomeini, the state established three-member panels across the country—known as Death Commissions—consisting of prosecutors, religious judges, and intelligence officials. Thousands of political prisoners who were already serving fixed judicial sentences were brought before these panels and subjected to brief ideological inquisitions regarding their faith, loyalty to the state, and willingness to clear landmines for the military. Those who refused to repent were taken directly to mass gallows.
• Secret Burials and Cleansed Memory: Between 4,000 and 5,000 prisoners were executed within a few weeks. Their bodies were dumped into unmarked individual and mass graves, such as the Khavaran Cemetery in southeast Tehran. To this day, the state refuses to issue official death certificates or disclose the final resting places to grieving families.
• The Permanence of Impunity: The individuals who organized and carried out the 1988 massacre were never removed from power. Instead, they climbed through the ranks of the bureaucracy, taking high-level positions as heads of the Judiciary, Ministers of Justice, and Presidents of the Republic. This structural impunity signals to low-ranking interrogators and prison guards that the state will shield them from any legal consequences for killing dissidents.

The Denial of Indigent Defense and the Mechanics of Star-Chamber Trials

Established as temporary tribunals immediately after the 1979 revolution to purge the former administration, the Revolutionary Courts (Dahgah-haye Enqelab) have been preserved as a permanent star-chamber system designed to bypass standard judicial review.

The Exclusion of Independent Counsel (Note to Article 48)

The primary mechanism for stripping a political detainee of legal defense is the Note to Article 48 of the Iranian Criminal Procedure Code.

• Under this rule, individuals accused of political or national security offenses are barred from selecting independent lawyers during the crucial pre-trial interrogation phase.
• Defendants must choose their legal counsel from an exclusive, pre-approved list compiled directly by the Head of the Judiciary.
• These state-approved lawyers frequently act as secondary interrogators, encouraging clients to accept the state's charges rather than providing a real defense.

Due Process Failure Modes

• Secret Trials: Trials are conducted behind closed doors, bar public entry, and exclude independent international observers.
• Restrictions on Case Access: Independent defense attorneys are routinely blocked from reading their clients' case files, often seeing the indictments only minutes before the trial begins.
• The Absence of a Jury: Sentences are handed down by a single judge sitting alone, eliminating any check on judicial overreach.

The Targeted Suppression of Marginalized Demographics

The structural violence of the state is not distributed evenly across the population. It targets marginalized communities with intensified legal bias and heightened physical violence.

Enforced Disappearances, Medical Neglect, and the Targeting of Families

The state's efforts to silence dissent extend far beyond formal sentencing. The security apparatus deploys deniable, slow-acting methods of elimination to neutralize former prisoners and intimidate social movements.

Deliberate Medical Neglect

The denial of medical treatment is used systematically as an extension of physical interrogation.

• Prison authorities routinely block the transfer of critically ill political prisoners (sufferers of cancer, cardiac conditions, or advanced infections) to outside hospitals.
• Vital prescription medications sent by families are intercepted or withheld by prison guards to break the non-compliant stance of hunger strikers.

Enforced Disappearances and Clandestine Arrests

Citizens are regularly seized from public places by plainclothes security personnel driving unmarked vehicles.

• The state denies custody of the missing individual, leaving families without any information regarding their location, health, or status for months.
• This removes the detainee from the protection of the law and increases the risk of extrajudicial execution during interrogation.

The War on Transnational Justice and Families of Victims

The state targets the living family members of killed activists to prevent them from seeking international accountability.

• The Criminalization of Mourning: Mothers, fathers, and siblings of victims (such as the Mothers of Khavaran or families of the 2019 and 2022 victims) face arrest for organizing memorial services or demanding truth.
• Desecration of Memory: Gravestones of executed political dissidents are systematically defaced, smashed, or bulldozed by plainclothes agents to erase public memory of the state's actions.

Hostage Diplomacy and the Limitations of Global Human Rights Frameworks

Despite numerous UN General Assembly resolutions, investigations by the UN Fact-Finding Mission, and detailed reports from special rapporteurs, the international community has failed to halt Iran's domestic execution infrastructure. This failure stems from a series of systemic geopolitical vulnerabilities.

• The Geopolitics of Hostage Diplomacy: The Islamic Republic utilizes a deliberate policy of hostage-taking as a tool of foreign relations. By detaining dual nationals and foreign citizens on fabricated espionage charges, the state creates an asymmetrical diplomatic advantage. Western democracies are routinely forced to trade imprisoned Iranian operatives (such as convicted terrorists or human rights abusers arrested abroad) or release frozen financial assets in exchange for their citizens, undermining international legal precedent.
• The Primacy of Strategic Portfolios: In the international arena, human rights considerations are frequently sidelined in favor of pressing regional security priorities. Negotiations surrounding Iran's nuclear program (JCPOA frameworks), regional ballistic proliferation, and the security of global energy shipping corridors often eclipse discussions about domestic political executions during bilateral summits.
• The Veto Shield and Soft Compliance: Recommendations made by the UN Human Rights Council lack binding enforcement mechanisms. When human rights cases are elevated toward the UN Security Council, the state utilizes its economic alliances with global powers like China and Russia to shield itself from multilateral sanctions, rendering international resolutions largely symbolic.

Eradicating Structural Impunity and Disassembling the Apparatus of Repression

Breaking the cycle of institutionalized violence in Iran requires a coordinated strategy that bridges domestic civil resistance with global judicial enforcement mechanisms.

1. International Judicial Action

• Universal Jurisdiction Prosecutions: Democratic nations must expand the use of universal jurisdiction to arrest, indict, and try visiting Iranian officials, judges, and prison directors who travel outside Iran's borders. The successful prosecution of Hamid Noury in Sweden serves as a foundational blueprint for holding low- and high-level human rights abusers accountable.
• Referral to the International Criminal Court (ICC): The UN Security Council should build a legal bridge to refer the systematic killing of protesters and political prisoners to the ICC as Crimes Against Humanity.
• Archiving and Chain of Custody: International human rights bodies must coordinate with local monitors to create secure, encrypted databases containing verified identity files of interrogators, judges, and executioners to prepare for future trials.

2. Multilateral Diplomatic Pressures

• Expansion of Magnitsky Sanctions: Western nations must deploy targeted Global Magnitsky Human Rights sanctions against the assets, offshore bank accounts, and travel privileges of individual Revolutionary Court judges, interrogators, and their immediate families.
• Human-Rights-Conditioned Relations: Any future bilateral or multilateral diplomatic agreements with Tehran must be linked to verifiable human rights improvements:
  1. An immediate moratorium on all capital punishment cases.
  2. The unconditional release of all political prisoners and prisoners of conscience.
  3. Granting UN special rapporteurs unimpeded access to inspect provincial detention centers.

3. Domestic Civil Empowerment

• Secure Digital Documentation: Activists inside the country must be supported with high-speed encryption tools, decentralized mesh networks, and satellite internet access to securely capture and export real-time evidence of human rights abuses without detection by state surveillance.
• Mutual Aid and Solidarity Funds: International labor unions and civic funds should establish secure, indirect financial lines to assist the families of striking workers, imprisoned union leaders, and executed dissidents. This support structure helps vulnerable communities withstand the state's efforts to use economic ruin as a way to silence political opposition.