Amnesty calls for Raisi to be investigated for crimes against humanity

ERBIL, Kurdistan Region — Rights monitor Amnesty International on Saturday said Iran’s president-elect should be investigated for crimes against humanity for his role in a 1988 prison massacre. 

“That Ebrahim Raisi has risen to the presidency instead of being investigated for the crimes against humanity of murder, enforced disappearance and torture, is a grim reminder that impunity reigns supreme in Iran,” said Amnesty International’s Secretary General Agnès Callamard.

Raisi was elected president of Iran on Friday, securing 62 percent of the vote, according to preliminary results. The hardline judge was the favourite to win since the powerful Guardian Council that vets candidates barred his main rivals from running.

In 1988, Raisi was a member of a “death commission” that oversaw the extrajudicial executions of an estimated 5,000 political prisoners. He was deputy prosecutor general of Tehran at the time.

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In the last weeks of the Iran-Iraq war, thousands of political dissidents serving prison sentences, most of a few years, were sentenced to be executed. Their bodies were buried in mass graves and, to this day, Iranian authorities continue to conceal the massacre. 

In 2019, Raisi was appointed head of Iran’s judiciary. During his tenure, he “presided over a spiraling crackdown on human rights which has seen hundreds of peaceful dissidents, human rights defenders and members of persecuted minority groups arbitrarily detained,” said Callamard. 

“Under his watch, the judiciary has also granted blanket impunity to government officials and security forces responsible for unlawfully killing hundreds of men, women and children and subjecting thousands of protesters to mass arrests and at least hundreds to enforced disappearance, and torture and other ill-treatment during and in the aftermath of the nationwide protests of November 2019,” she added. 

Amnesty urged the United Nations to launch an investigation. 

Human Rights Watch has also voiced concern over his election, which it said will further erode political rights and accountability in the country.

“Iranian authorities paved the way for Ebrahim Raeesi to become president through repression and an unfair election,” Michael Page, deputy Middle East director at Human Rights Watch said in a statement on Saturday. “As head of Iran’s repressive judiciary, Raeesi oversaw some of the most heinous crimes in Iran’s recent history, which deserve investigation and accountability rather than election to high office.”