António Guterres highlights ongoing calls for truth over Iran’s 1988 massacre

United Nations Secretary General António Guterres has in a new report highlighted the ongoing calls for truth and justice over the 1988 massacre of political prisoners in Iran.

A new report by the Secretary-General to the UN General Assembly about the “Situation of human rights in the Islamic Republic of Iran”, dated 31 October 2017, includes a paragraph about the 1988 massacre.

The paragraph reads:

“54. During the reporting period, the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) continued to receive a large number of complaints from families of the victims of executions which took place in 1988. In a joint statement issued in March, 20 human rights organizations called on the authorities to stop the harassment, intimidation and prosecution of human rights defenders seeking truth and justice on behalf of individuals who were summarily executed or forcibly disappeared during the 1980s and of their families. Among them are Mansoureh Behkish, Maryam Akbari-Monfared and Raheleh Rahemipour. In February, Mr. Ahmad Montazeri, the son of the late Ayatollah Hossein Ali Montazeri, who released an audio recording of his father denouncing the executions and was sentenced to 21 years of imprisonment in November 2016 was taken to Evin prison to serve his sentence but was released a couple of hours later”.

The Advance unedited version of the report A/72/562 is available at this link: http://www.ohchr.org/Documents/Countries/IR/ReportSG2017.pdf