This week the United Nations Human Rights Council is holding its 49th annual session, during which a resolution was approved to extend the mandate of Javaid Rehman, the UN Special Rapporteur on human rights in Iran. In response, Kazem Gharib Abadi, the regime’s judiciary deputy of international affairs and secretary of the mullahs’ so-called “Human Rights Department,” met with Michelle Bachelet, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, to voice his complaints about the Iranian opposition People’s Mojahedin Organization of Iran (PMOI/MEK), their actions and revelations that have proven to be costly for the mullahs’ regime.
Gharib Abadi’s main objective in Geneva has been to prevent, or at least confront, a circulating resolution aiming to condemn the regime’s human rights violations during the Human Rights Council, and the extension of Rehman’s mandate into ongoing human rights violations by the mullahs across Iran.
“The Special Rapporteur has become a channel to publish false information provided by terrorist groups. This terrorist group is currently freely going about and continuing their measures against the [mullahs’ regime] in the very capitals of those countries that are behind the resolution appointing a special rapporteur for Iran,” Gharib Abadi said in his recent remarks.
Gharib Abadi’s outburst of hypocrisy comes at a time when the mullahs’ regime has launched a new wave of executions in its prisons. On February 22, regime authorities hanged en masse at least five of the 12 death row prisoners transferred to solitary confinement in Gohardasht Prison in Karaj, a large city located just west of the Iranian capital, Tehran.
Simultaneously, Farshad Farzi, a 30-year-old Kurdish prisoner and a resident of Malekshahi, a city in Ilam province, western Iran, was hanged in Ilam Central Prison after enduring eight years in prison.
On February 21, one prisoner in Mashhad and another prisoner in Kashan, and on February 16 and 19, two prisoners were executed in the central prisons of Isfahan and Zahedan, respectively.
Meanwhile, on February 24, Ali Rezaei, an 18-year-old prisoner on death row, committed suicide in Lakan Prison of Rasht in northern Iran.
Of course, these are the cases of executions that are made public in Iran. The regime has a vast network of secret facilities where many prisoners and dissidents are held in inhumane conditions.
Gharib Abadi is deputy to Gholam-Hossein Mohseni-Ejei, head of the regime’s so-called judiciary. Ejei has a background of violence, crime, and persecution against protesters and dissidents. Ejei has been blacklisted by the U.S. and European Union for his human rights violations. Ejei is also among the living members of the regime’s notorious Death Commissions involved in determining the fate of over tens of thousands of political prisoners in two-minute-long kangaroo trials during the summer 1988 massacre across Iran. Over 30,000 political prisoners, mostly PMOI/MEK members and supporters, were sent to the gallows by Ejei and others like hm sitting on the regime’s Death Commissions.
As a result, the likes of Gharib Abadi and Ejei, and many others like them in the mullahs’ regime, have no place in voicing complains about human rights violations.
The continuation of arbitrary executions on the eve of the UN Human Rights Council upcoming session and ongoing nuclear talks in Vienna proves once again that the mullahs’ regime ruling relies heavily on continuing its massive domestic crackdown machine of repression, execution, and torture.
Such atrocious human rights violations have no place in the 21st century. The Iranian Resistance once again urges the United Nations and all relevant agencies, as well as the European Union and its member states, to take urgent action to save the lives of death row prisoners in Iran.
All political and economic relations with Iran, and the continuation of nuclear talks in Vienna must be conditioned upon a complete halt of executions, the use of tortures, and a long slate of human rights violations by the mullahs’ regime.
