19th June 2021 - Amnesty International's Secretary-General, Agnes Callamard, expressed her condemnation of the installation of Ebrahim Raisi as the regime's president following the sham election which took place on 18th June in Iran.
She said in a statement: “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.
In 2018, our organization documented how Ebrahim Raisi had been a member of the Death Commission which forcibly disappeared and extrajudicially executed in secret thousands of political dissidents in Evin and Gohardasht prisons near Tehran in 1988. The circumstances surrounding the fate of the victims and the whereabouts of their bodies are, to this day, systematically concealed by the Iranian authorities, amounting to ongoing crimes against humanity.”
On the same day, Amnesty International also wrote a public statement highlighting their concerns about Raisi's new role as president. They drew attention to Raisi's long history of human rights abuses through his various positions within the regime. In particular, they named him as one of the main perpetrators of the 1988 massacre of political prisoners in Iran. Furthermore, they spoke about his role before the presidency, as Head of the Judiciary. During this time he oversaw the brutal crackdown of nationwide peaceful protests in 2019 which lead to the regime's security forces killing 1500 protesters and arresting and imprisoning hundreds of others. In 2018, Amnesty International wrote a 200-page report on the 1988 massacre entitled Blood-soaked secrets: Why Iran’s 1988 prison massacres are ongoing crimes against humanity which you can read here.
