On October 4, 2025, Iran's Supreme Court confirmed for the third time the death sentence of Mohammad Javad Vafaei-Sani, a young boxing coach and political prisoner from Mashhad, accused of participating in the November 2019 protests. This decision, announced by his lawyer Babak Paknia on social media, has reignited international outrage and drawn renewed attention to the broader crisis of human rights abuses and capital punishment in Iran. The timing of this ruling—coming just days after a major United Nations conference in Geneva spotlighted Iran’s spiraling execution rates and systemic impunity—underscores the regime’s ongoing campaign to silence dissent and intimidate opposition.
Vafaei-Sani’s ordeal began in February 2020, when he was arrested in the wake of the nationwide protests that swept Iran in late 2019. According to human rights sources cited by the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI), he endured 65 days of severe physical and psychological torture designed to extract false confessions. The charge against him, “corruption on earth through deliberate destruction of public property,” has become a catch-all accusation frequently wielded by authorities against protesters and dissidents. Despite repeated annulments by higher courts, the lower Mashhad Revolutionary Court, led by Judge Mansouri, persistently reissued the death sentence—culminating in the Supreme Court’s latest confirmation, which Paknia denounced as the product of “the intervention of security agencies.”
“The death sentence of Mr. Mohammad Javad Vafaei-Sani… despite numerous legal flaws, was confirmed by Branch 9 of the Supreme Court,” Paknia wrote on X (formerly Twitter), warning that the process was marred by political pressure, lack of access to legal counsel, reliance on forced confessions, and secret, closed-door trials. Human rights defenders have condemned the proceedings as a flagrant violation of the right to a fair trial, noting the absence of concrete forensic evidence and the judiciary’s apparent subservience to the regime’s security apparatus.
This case is not an isolated incident. On September 29, 2025, the European headquarters of the United Nations in Geneva hosted a high-level conference during the 60th Session of the UN Human Rights Council, focusing on the accelerating crisis of human rights in Iran. The conference, attended by parliamentarians, diplomats, and activists, zeroed in on the dramatic spike in executions, the brutal suppression of dissent, and the regime’s ongoing impunity for past atrocities—most notably the 1988 massacre of political prisoners, which the UN has described as both genocide and a crime against humanity.
Maryam Rajavi, President-elect of the NCRI, delivered a keynote address via video message, presenting chilling statistics: “at least 450 people have been executed in less than three months” since early July, and “in the past 14 months, 1,850 people—including 59 women—have been executed.” According to Rajavi, the regime’s lethal campaign is primarily targeted at dissenters, especially members and supporters of the People’s Mojahedin Organization of Iran (PMOI/MEK). She highlighted the legal framework used to justify these executions, noting that a regime expert in a Tehran court declared that all conditions for the charge of bagh-ye (rebellion against the regime) apply to PMOI members, for whom “the punishment for bagh-ye is death, without exception.”
Two PMOI members, Behrouz Ehsani and Mehdi Hassani, were executed in July 2025 on charges including membership in this organization, while fourteen others face imminent execution. Rajavi also drew attention to the “No to Execution Tuesdays” campaign, in which prisoners across 52 prisons have staged hunger strikes every Tuesday for 87 consecutive weeks. She detailed how the regime’s violence extends beyond executions, including the denial of basic medical care to prisoners—particularly women in facilities like Qarchak Prison—leading to further deaths.
“The crimes of the early 1980s—especially the 1988 massacre—remain unpunished and are now being repeated in Iran’s prisons and streets,” Rajavi declared. She called on the international community to end the regime’s “unjustified impunity,” supporting the UN Special Rapporteur’s call for states to “use universal jurisdiction to issue arrest warrants for Khamenei and other officials responsible for these atrocities.” Rajavi linked the Iranian people’s struggle for freedom directly to global peace and stability, urging governments and UN bodies to recognize and support their fight for justice.
Tahar Boumedra, President of the Justice for Victims of the 1988 Massacre in Iran (JVMI), emphasized that Iran’s use of the death penalty is not merely punitive but a means of governance and political persecution. Boumedra recalled Iran’s explicit refusal to comply with UN resolutions calling for a moratorium on the death penalty and highlighted the summary nature of political trials—often lasting only minutes, with defendants denied access to lawyers or time to prepare a defense. “Being in the opposition, it’s worth a death penalty,” Boumedra stated, describing the process as “extrajudicial killing.” He concluded with a message of defiance from Evin prison: “They are saying to defy that penalty, we sacrifice our lives, but we will not abandon freedom.”
Other speakers echoed these concerns. Ingrid Betancourt, former Colombian senator, noted that nearly 2,000 people have been executed since Masoud Pezeshkian took office as Iran’s president. She emphasized the regime’s specific targeting of Iranian Resistance members, such as Ehsani and Hassani, “whose only crime was that they supported freedom and that they were affiliated with a democratic opposition movement.” Betancourt called for a UN resolution mandating an international investigation into ongoing executions and the 1988 massacre, arguing that the Iranian case “is the mother case of human rights violation in the world, setting a dangerous precedent that emboldens dictatorships elsewhere.”
Nicolas Walder, a Swiss National Council member, described the executions and torture as a “deliberate policy of intimidation and terror,” pointing to Amnesty International’s reports on the destruction of graves belonging to political prisoners as an attempt to erase evidence of past crimes. Laurence Fellman Rielle, another Swiss MP, cataloged arbitrary arrests, torture, and systematic discrimination against women and minorities as routine features of Iran’s repressive apparatus. She criticized diplomatic backroom dealings and voiced support for Maryam Rajavi’s Ten-Point Plan for a secular, democratic, and gender-equal Iran.
Gianfranco Fattorini of the Mouvement contre le racisme et pour l’amitié entre les peuples (MRAP) redirected attention from Iran’s nuclear ambitions to its core human rights violations, especially the “gender apartheid” following Mahsa Amini’s death in 2022. He called for an international investigative mechanism to gather and preserve evidence for future criminal prosecution of regime perpetrators.
Personal testimonies, such as those of Safora Sadidi and Elham Sajedian, drove home the devastating human cost of the regime’s policies. Sadidi, whose father was among the 30,000 political prisoners executed in 1988, decried the regime’s ongoing threats to repeat the massacre and the international community’s failure to act decisively. Sajedian recounted her father’s execution in 1985, the torture he endured, and the lasting trauma of growing up with an unnamed grave.
As the Supreme Court’s confirmation of Vafaei-Sani’s death sentence starkly illustrates, Iran’s regime continues to wield the death penalty as a tool of political repression. Despite mounting international condemnation and calls for accountability, the machinery of state violence grinds on—leaving families shattered and the world grappling with how to respond to one of the most urgent human rights crises of our time.
