Nazanin Boniadi is an Iranian-born human rights activist, actress and 2023 Sydney Peace Prize Laureate. Roya Boroumand is the Co-Founder and Executive Director of the Boroumand Center for Human Rights in Iran.

The Islamic Republic authorities in Iran are going on an execution binge, using the spiraling instability and conflicts in the Middle East — in which they are complicit — as a smokescreen for their crimes against the Iranian people.

On January 22, the mother of Mohammad Ghobadlou, a 23-year-old street protester in the “Woman Life Freedom” uprising in Iran, made an emotional videotape pleading for her son’s life to be spared. Ghobadlou was bipolar and his death sentence had been quashed by the Supreme Court. A retrial involving an adequate mental health assessment had been ordered in July 2023.

Despite this, his execution took place a day after his mother’s appeal, with only a 12-hour notice to his lawyer because Iran’s Chief Justice vetoed the retrial and made sure Ghobadlou was secretly sentenced to death. This is not the first nor the last execution carried out in Iran in flagrant violation of the Islamic Republic’s international human rights obligations, and with utter contempt for the rule of law. He is at least the ninth protester to be executed in connection to the 2022 protests. Farhad Salimi, an Iranian Kurdish political prisoner subjected to torture-tainted “confession" and whose decade-long pleas for a fair retrial were ignored, was arbitrarily executed on the same day as Ghobadlou. Less than a week after their execution, four more Kurdish dissidents who were forcibly disappeared in July 2022 — Pejman Fatehi, Mohsan Mazloum, Mohammad Hazhir Faramarzi and Wafa Azarbar — were also executed after grossly unfair and secretive trials, and allegations of torture. Adding insult to injury, the authorities are refusing to return the bodies to the families for burial.