Maryam Rajavi’s Message to Human Rights Forum in Geneva

Maryam Rajavi: Urgent Need to Press for UN Access to Prisons and Prisoners in Iran

Honorable lawmakers of the Geneva Grand Council and the National Council of Switzerland,
Distinguished observers and defenders of human rights,
Amid the ongoing killings and the bloodbath unfolding inside Iran’s prisons, your conference carries exceptional significance.
This slaughter is Khamenei’s war against the people of Iran, and a test for the international community.
It is encouraging that the Third Committee of the UN General Assembly, in its resolution, referred to massacre of the political prisoners in Iran in 1988.
This resolution marks an important step following the July 2024 report of the UN Special Rapporteur, Professor Javaid Rehman.
In his report, for the first time, the United Nations recognized the executions of the 1980s and the 1988 massacre of political prisoners as acts of genocide and crimes against humanity.

Justice for the Victims of the 1988 Massacre

At this moment, I am reminded of Prof. Kazem Rajavi, who, twenty months after the massacre of 30,000 political prisoners in 1988, was assassinated by the regime’s criminal agents dispatched to Geneva.
He was the advocate seeking justice for the victims of the 1988 massacre.
Those innocent victims were serving, or had already served, their sentences. Despite horrific torture, those heroes stood firm for the cause of freedom for the Iranian people and were hanged. The clerics revealed neither their names nor the locations of their graves.
Moreover, they became victims of the world’s silence and censorship, as governments and international bodies chose to appease the regime.
Four weeks after the massacre, on August 25, 1988, the Leader of the Iranian Resistance, Massoud Rajavi, revealed in a telegram to the then UN Secretary-General Khomeini’s edict ordering the massacre and the arrest of over ten thousand people.
Unfortunately, the United Nations and the international community remained silent, and this silence and inaction have persisted as their policy for decades.

The Continuation of Executions and Global Destabilization by the Regime

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the Convention Against Torture are achievements of human sufferings.
These achievements must be freed from the chains of commerce and appeasement, and put at the service of the oppressed.
The suffering people of Iran must feel the United Nations as their support under the rule of these oppressors.
Two years ago, the ruling clerics hanged 865 people. Last year, one thousand were executed, and this year, to this date, 1,650 have been hanged. Thousands more are awaiting execution.
Among them are dozens of political prisoners, such as Zahra Tabari and Javad Vafaei Sani.
This ongoing slaughter is part of a unified strategy, which also includes waging war, exporting terror, and expanding nuclear weapons. As long as this regime can continue executions, it will also pursue a policy of destabilizing the region and the world.
We call on the United Nations to take the necessary steps to refer the case of human rights violations in Iran to the UN Security Council.

The Urgent Need for Action by the United Nations and International Bodies

The United Nations must call on member states to, under the principle of universal jurisdiction, bring the regime’s leaders and those responsible for crimes against humanity and genocide to justice.
Furthermore, the UN must pressure the Iranian regime to allow UN officials and other human rights bodies to visit prisons and prisoners in Iran, particularly political prisoners.
Today, Khamenei holds political prisoners hostage under inhumane conditions. Some, such as Maryam Akbari Monfared, Gholam-Hossein Kalbi, Saeed Shah-Qal’eh, and Saeed Massouri, have been in prison for two to three decades.
But just as the notorious Saydnaya prison of the Syrian dictatorship collapsed last December, Evin and other notorious prisons of Khamenei will also collapse.

Dear friends,
We are fighting for an Iran free of executions and torture. Without a doubt, through organized resistance and the uprising of the Iranian people, we will realize this goal.