Support the campaign

For the first time in the Iranian history, a campaign is due to be held to set up a Commission of Inquiry and an internationally symbolic tribunal to investigate the massacre of political prisoners in Iran. The campaign has a clear historical precedent and will be modelled on the tribunals set up by Bertrand Russell and Jean Paul Sartre in their 1965-1967 world campaign against the American atrocities in the Vietnam War.

The aim of the campaign is to hold the leaders and other leading high-level officials of the Islamic Republic of Iran accountable for the killing of 20,000 political prisoners in 1980s, the massacre of political in the summer of 1988 in particular.

This campaign will have the authority to bring this human tragedy, concealed and unacknowledged for so long, onto the world stage, where the brutality and cruelty of the Islamic regime can at last be examined, exposed and judged.

The world should know what took place in Iran in the 1980s - in the summer of 1988 in particular. The horror and brutality was of such criminal magnitude that if it can be exposed, and we believe the evidence will be sufficiently convincing, then the Islamic Republic of Iran should be condemned and held to account.

This campaign needs to be carried out internationally. With your solidarity and through  united action, we can surely succeed in mobilising world opinion to our humanitarian cause,  thereby making the Iranian regime accountable for their crimes against humanity with this essential and much-needed tribunal.

If you share the aims of the tribunal and wish tens of thousands of families of victims to have a voice, to contribute, join or support the campaign legally, publicity, financially etc, please email us.

Email: info@irantribunal.com

Background

In the summer of 1988, the Islamic Republic of Iran massacred thousands of political prisoners across the country.  Men and women were taken out of their cells, blindfolded and were either shot by a firing squad or were hanged within the prison compounds or in prison prayer rooms.  Not a single one of the prisoners was given a proper trial.  Instead, a group that later became known as the “Death Commission”, decided the fate of the prisoners on the basis of their answers to a few questions.  No one knows the exact number of those executed , a consequence of censorship and severe repression in Iran.

But to this day there are around 5,000 known names of victims which have been documented by families, political parties and human rights organizations.  The Islamic Republic of Iran refuses to provide any information or details about the massacres or the location of the victims’ graves, although a number of mass graves have been discovered by the families. The most well-known graves were found in Khavaran cemetery in the southwest suburbs of Tehran, the capital of Iran.  Families gather here each year on August 31st to honour the memory of their loved ones.

The massacre of political prisoners in 1988 was the culmination of the Islamic Republic’s policy of repression against its opponents in the period 1981 to 1988, under which around 20,000 dissidents disappeared, died under torture or were executed either by firing squad or by hanging.

For further information, please click on the following link.

http://www.irantribunal.com/English/Documents.html