Last week, the NGO known as Justice for the Victims of the 1988 Massacre in Iran (JVMI) published an open letter to Mai Sato, the United Nations special rapporteur on the situation of human rights in Iran, in which former world leaders, leading human rights experts, jurists, and Nobel laureates urged her to publicly condemn six recent death sentences handed down to supporters of the People’s Mojahedin Organization of Iran.

The PMOI, or MEK, has long been recognized as the leading source of pro-democracy opposition to Iran’s theocratic dictatorship, and as such, has variously been targeted for extermination by that regime. In 1988, it was the main target of the massacre that began after then-Supreme Leader Ruhollah Khomeini issued a fatwa declaring that organized opposition to his rule constituted “enmity against God” and was inherently punishable by death.

In total, the 1988 massacre is estimated to have claimed around 30,000 victims, of which roughly 90% were MEK members or supporters. The incident stands as an enduring reminder of how serious the regime’s abuse of the death penalty can become, especially in absence of serious international efforts to secure accountability from the regime or its officials.

To date, there has been no such accountability for participants in the 1988 massacre, despite longstanding efforts by JVMI, the MEK, and Iranian activist networks to expose key details, including the locations of secret mass graves. Many of those details were cited in a comprehensive report prepared by Sato’s predecessor, Javaid Rehman, before he concluded his mission as special rapporteur earlier this year.

What is even more alarming is that one of the six, Mohammad Taghavi, is a survivor of the 1988 massacre, and by sentencing him to death, the regime is hell-bent on eliminating a witness to its atrocious crimes.

The report noted that the 1988 massacre might qualify as genocide, as authorities targeted the MEK for opposing their theocratic ideology. Many legal scholars have echoed this, urging arrest warrants to prosecute “death commission” members at the ICC or within democratic countries’ jurisdictions.

As noted in JVMI’s letter, which bore the signatures of 160 former world leaders, ministers, ambassadors, human rights experts, and fellow NGOs, the six sentences in question are “part of a broader campaign to suppress dissent and instill fear among Iranians, particularly targeting individuals advocating for democratic freedoms and human rights.” That pattern has been widely recognized by human rights organizations like Amnesty International, which have accused the regime of attempting to intimidate the public into silence in the wake of the nationwide uprising in September 2022.

The movement that emerged in the aftermath morphed into explicit demands for regime change — demands that had characterized several previous uprisings. In each of those cases, the relevant slogans were closely associated with the MEK, illustrating the widespread popular support for the leading pro-democracy opposition group and the regime’s repeated inability to suppress it.

The JVMI letter also noted that at least three MEK members were sentenced to death in September, further underscoring the risk of a targeted massacre emerging in the wake of the ongoing, general surge of executions. Last year, that surge claimed more than 850 lives — an eight-year high — and the Islamic Republic is on pace to exceed that figure by the end of this year, as 870, including 21 women, have already been executed so far.

The international community must respond vigorously to this situation now, lest they give the regime tacit permission to continue escalating their overall crackdown, while also putting more focus on those activists who pose the greatest potential risk to the mullahs’ hold on power.

The recently condemned MEK supporters no doubt understand that their own activist community fits that description, and their communications from Evin Prison represent admirable pride in that face, more than fear of the imminent threat to their own lives.

In a letter dated December 2, five of the six death penalty recipients — Seyyed Abolhassan Montazer, Babak Alipour, Shahrokh Daneshvarkar, Vahid Bani Amerian, and PouyaGhobadi — highlighted their own torture and “hundreds of violations of our basic human rights from the moment of our arrest until today,” but want to urge fellow activists to not be cowed by those details and instead “turn the despair and fear caused by mass death sentences into boldness, rebellion and revolutionary fire to uproot this regime.”

The international community should find inspiration in these words. And if the Iranian people are capable of keeping alive the sentiment that underlays the 2022 uprising even today, then it should be comparatively easy for Western policymakers and institutions such as the United Nations Human Rights Council to uphold their own human rights principles by demanding accountability for those Iranian officials who have overseen countless abuses and crimes against humanity, from the 1988 massacre right up to the present day.