The outgoing UN special rapporteur on the situation of human rights in Iran, Prof. Javaid Rehman, issued his final report on July 17, 2024, and reiterated a call for international bodies, including the UN, to hold Iranian officials accountable for “atrocity crimes.” The landmark report emphasized the mass executions of political prisoners in the 1980s and affirmed that there are grounds to label these killings as “genocide” and to prosecute them accordingly.

Rehman underscored that the Mujahedin-e Khalq (PMOI/MEK), which is the country’s leading pro-democracy opposition, was the main target of the 1988 massacre. Some 30,000 of its members and sympathizers were lost to the Iranian regime’s gallows just between July and September 1988, according to credible reports. The report acknowledged that the evident purpose of the massacre was to destroy not just the MEK but entire communities identified by regime officials and then-Supreme Leader Khomeini as “enemies of Islam.”

This explains why in his report, the special rapporteur noted that the atrocity crimes of 1981-1981 and 1988 should be treated as a crime of genocide, because the overwhelming majority of the victims, while Muslims, were considered by the regime to be deviant and branded as “Monafeqin,” meaning hypocrites.

Rehman’s report noted that the massacre itself was preceded by a “pattern of threats, interrogations, classification procedures, and prisoner transfers,” all culminating in a lockdown of prisons across the country during the summer of 1988. Although this shielded the massacre from public view, the regime had thoroughly broadcast its intentions ahead of time, with leading regime officials saying as early as 1980 that “the People’s Mojahedin are apostates and worse than infidels,” not even owed the “right to life.”

The Iranian people have duly criticized Western powers for brushing aside warnings about the massacre. They have also linked the world’s silence on that massacre to a broader trend of “appeasement” in dealing with the Iranian regime.

Even at the time of the massacre, international media coverage of the regime seemed largely focused on promoting optimism about the prospect of moderation within the regime. In the more than 35 years since, little has changed. The July 5 election of Masoud Pezeshkian as the theocracy’s new president has spawned a new, albeit naïve, round of cheerleading for nascent reform.

In order to stand for election, Pezeshkian had to be vetted for loyalty to that system and to Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei himself, and he affirmed that loyalty in multiple public statements throughout his campaign. Yet various Western media outlets have downplayed the significance of this context, while focus on Pezeshkian’s dubious progressive soundbites has buried most lingering references to the human rights record of his predecessor, Ebrahim Raisi, whose tenure was cut short by a fatal helicopter crash in May.

Rehman’s report, however, may yet bring renewed attention to the fact of Raisi’s leading role in the 1988 massacre as a member of the Tehran “death commission” that oversaw implementation of Khomeini’s “fatwa” against the opposition in Evin and Gohardasht Prisons. Of the sources used in the preparation of his report, Rehman wrote: “Many witnesses in their testimonies made references to his role in the mass executions of 1988.” Rehman then went on to say that Raisi’s death “must not result in the denial of the right to truth, justice and reparations for the Iranian people,” nor diminish awareness of the “impunity” that Raisi’s presidency represented.

As Rehman also noted, many other perpetrators of the 1988 massacre have climbed through the ranks of the Iranian regime over the years. This, too, is a testament to the lack of accountability they have faced and the silence that has persisted in international policy circles despite a growing body of knowledge about the details of the massacre. To date, no one has faced legal consequences for that clear crime against humanity and probable genocide, with the sole exception of the former Gohardasht Prison guard Hamid Noury.

But even Noury, after being arrested by Swedish authorities in 2019 and later sentenced to life imprisonment for war crimes and mass murder, ultimately escaped justice when he was released to Iran in exchange for two Swedish nationals who were being held hostage by Tehran. Rehman acknowledged this as a source of “disappointment” but urged government throughout the world to open investigations into Iran’s general violations of international law so as to potentially set the stage for future arrests and prosecutions of Iranian human rights abusers on foreign territory.

That could be accomplished on a broader scale by establishing what Rehman’s report described as “an independent international investigative and accountability mechanism to advance truth, justice and accountability … by gathering, consolidating and preserving evidence” of the regime’s crimes against humanity. Similar calls to action have come from various sources over many years, but the main obstacle has repeatedly shown itself to be the world’s unwillingness to confront Tehran directly, or to relinquish the illusion of moderate trends within the regime. For the sake of universal human rights, this must change.