Solidarity with the “No to Executions Tuesdays” Campaign in Iran

Achille Campagna, 13 October 2026

Today, Tuesday 13 October 2026, political prisoners and death-row inmates in Iran begin the 142nd consecutive week of the “No to Executions Tuesdays” hunger strike. I want to state publicly that I support them.

According to Justice for the Victims of the 1988 Massacre in Iran (JVMI), the campaign began on 30 January 2024 in one ward of Ghezel Hesar Prison in Karaj. It has since spread to 66 detention facilities across the country, including Evin, Qarchak, Ghezel Hesar, Vakilabad, Adelabad, Lakan, Zahedan, Sanandaj and Urmia. Every Tuesday the prisoners refuse food for 24 hours. JVMI explains that they chose Tuesday deliberately. In Iran’s main prisons, condemned prisoners are moved to solitary confinement at the start of the week and executed at dawn on Tuesdays and Wednesdays. The strikers have turned that day into a day of collective refusal. It is now the longest coordinated prison strike in modern Iranian history.

The prisoners are not asking for anything for themselves. JVMI reports that their demand is the abolition of the death penalty for everyone: political prisoners, protesters, trade unionists, members of the Baluch and Kurdish minorities, and the poor defendants convicted of drug offences who make up a large share of those executed.

This week the campaign gained an important voice. Gina Romero, the UN Special Rapporteur on the rights to freedom of peaceful assembly and of association, announced that she is joining the hunger strike today. She warned that Iran is using the death penalty to punish people for exercising their rights to assembly, association, expression and political participation. She also noted that at least 46 protesters have been executed since March, the highest number of political executions in nearly forty years. When a UN mandate-holder takes part in a prisoners’ hunger strike, it tells us these executions are not an internal matter of criminal justice. They are an international human rights emergency. I thank her and join her call.

As a lawyer working in international criminal law, I am alarmed by what the cases documented by JVMI show. Vahid Bani-Amerian, Seyed Abolhassan Montazer, Pouya Ghobadi, Akbar (Shahrokh) Daneshvarkar, Babak Alipour and Seyed Mohammad Taghavi were executed at Ghezel Hesar between late March and early April. According to JVMI, they were convicted in summary proceedings before Branches 15 and 26 of the Tehran Revolutionary Court. They had no independent counsel, and confessions were reportedly extracted under torture in Ward 209 of Evin. Their bodies were not returned to their families.

Iran has been a party to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights since 1975, and these facts engage two of its core guarantees together:

• Article 14 (the right to a fair trial). It guarantees a competent, independent and impartial tribunal, the presumption of innocence, adequate time and facilities to prepare a defence, counsel of one’s own choosing, and the right not to be compelled to confess guilt.

• Article 6 (the right to life). It allows a death sentence, where the death penalty still exists, only for the “most serious crimes” and only under a final judgment from a competent court, in proceedings consistent with the Covenant as a whole.

The two provisions are inseparable. As the UN Human Rights Committee has made clear in General Comment No. 36, a death sentence imposed after proceedings that violate Article 14 makes the deprivation of life arbitrary, in breach of Article 6. No conduct that consists of political association, belief or peaceful protest can count as one of the “most serious crimes”.

The pattern also has a history, and it has already been examined by the United Nations. In July 2024, Professor Javaid Rehman, then UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Islamic Republic of Iran, published his report “Atrocity Crimes” and grave violations of human rights committed by the Islamic Republic of Iran (1981–1982 and 1988). He concluded that the mass executions of political prisoners in those years amounted to crimes against humanity, including murder and extermination, and to genocide. In particular, he found that the killings, torture and other inhumane acts against members of the PMOI were carried out with genocidal intent. Rehman also stressed that the officials responsible have never been held accountable, and that this impunity has allowed the same practices to continue.

JVMI’s documentation shows how closely today’s cases follow that pattern. Capital charges of baghi (armed rebellion) and moharebeh (enmity against God) are being used against people for organisational ties, for distributing literature, or for refusing to renounce their beliefs. That is the same “steadfastness” test the 1988 “Death Commissions” used to choose who would die. Vahid Bani-Amerian’s last message, released by JVMI, deliberately invoked that continuity. JVMI also reports that dozens of political prisoners, women detained in Evin among them, remain under confirmed or pending death sentences on the same charges. Read together with the Special Rapporteur’s 2024 findings, these are exactly the warning signs that the framework for preventing atrocity crimes exists to catch.

I therefore call on:

• the Iranian authorities to impose an immediate moratorium on executions, annul every death sentence imposed in breach of Articles 6 and 14 of the ICCPR, and return the remains of those executed to their families;

• States and international organisations to raise individual cases at the highest level, ensure independent monitoring of prisoners at risk, and follow up on the Special Rapporteur’s 2024 call for accountability, including through universal jurisdiction and an international investigative mechanism for past and present atrocity crimes;

• colleagues in the legal profession to lend their voices, their expertise and their attention to these cases.

The prisoners on hunger strike are risking everything to defend the right to life. The least we can do from outside is make sure they are not ignored.

Achille Campagna