'Shame on you': Crowds of Iranians protest as regime hangs its young – Struan Stevenson
The democratic world must do more than just express sympathy as Iran’s dictatorial regime continues to torture and murder its own people
The world has become transfixed by war. Gaza dominates the headlines. Ukraine fills the television screens. Every diplomatic summit revolves around security, sanctions and shifting alliances. Behind this curtain of global conflict, however, Iran's clerical dictatorship has unleashed a campaign of political executions that should shame every democratic nation into action.
While the world's attention remains fixed elsewhere, Tehran's gallows continue their relentless work. On July 22, the regime executed 26-year-old law graduate Mehdi Khanaki, accusing him of membership of the People's Mojahedin Organisation of Iran (PMOI) and participation in January's nationwide uprising.
According to the National Council of Resistance of Iran, he endured months of physical and psychological torture before a revolutionary court condemned him in proceedings that lacked the most basic safeguards of justice. The story briefly surfaced beyond Iran's borders before disappearing beneath the weight of other international crises.
Torture and forced confessions
Khanaki's execution formed only one chapter in a widening campaign of repression. Within days, Tehran sentenced Isa Chari, a 37-year-old Baluch labourer and father of two, to death after seven months in solitary confinement. Accounting student Amir Hassan Akbari-Monfared, 22, received the same sentence after allegedly enduring torture to extract a forced confession. In both cases, alleged links to the PMOI carried greater weight than any publicly available evidence.
Then came the public executions in Isfahan. Amirhossein Safari-Hosseinabadi, 28, and Abolfazl Sepahi Badjani, 23, were hanged in Alikhani Square, where anti-government demonstrations erupted during January's uprising. Crowds gathered in a desperate attempt to stop the executions, chanting "shame on you" as security forces dispersed them.
Iranian officials claimed the men had murdered members of the security forces. Yet United Nations human rights experts have raised serious concerns about the fairness of the proceedings, citing allegations of torture, enforced disappearance, denial of legal representation and coerced confessions. Reuters and other international news organisations report that further defendants linked to the same case remain under sentence of death.
These executions form part of a far broader pattern. Human rights organisations estimate that dozens of political prisoners have already been executed this year, while hundreds more have faced the death penalty for other offences. Iran continues to execute more people per capita than almost any country on Earth. The gallows have become instruments of political intimidation every bit as much as criminal justice.
A culture of impunity
The timing carries a grim symbolism. This summer marks the 38th anniversary of the 1988 massacre, when around 30,000 political prisoners, overwhelmingly PMOI supporters, disappeared into mass graves after so-called "death commissions" ordered their execution.
The UN documented those atrocities. Human rights organisations preserved testimony from survivors. Families still search for the burial places of their murdered loved ones. Yet the architects of that crime escaped justice, allowing a culture of impunity to flourish. Today's executions represent the latest chapter in that unfinished history.
Judiciary chief Gholamhossein Mohseni Ejei has openly warned officials about the PMOI and demanded tougher security measures. Such rhetoric reflects more than concern over public order. It exposes profound anxiety inside a regime confronting mounting economic collapse, public anger and organised resistance. Tehran understands that authoritarian governments rarely fall because of foreign pressure alone. They fall when ordinary citizens lose their fear.
West’s weak, ineffective response
Where, then, stands the democratic world? The UN’s High Commissioner for Human Rights and Special Rapporteur have repeatedly expressed alarm over Iran's accelerating use of the death penalty and persistent violations of due process.
Expressions of concern, however, have failed to alter the regime's behaviour. The European Union continues diplomatic engagement while condemning individual abuses. Britain, France and Germany issue carefully worded statements yet stop short of measures that would impose a genuine cost upon those responsible.
Washington rightly devotes enormous attention to Iran's nuclear ambitions, ballistic missile programme and regional proxy network. Those threats matter profoundly.
Yet every debate over centrifuges and uranium enrichment risks overshadowing an equally urgent reality: a government using executions as a weapon against its people. Experience offers a clear lesson. Diplomatic engagement has never persuaded Tehran to moderate its domestic repression.
Instead, every period of international accommodation has coincided with intensified brutality at home. The regime reads hesitation as weakness and silence as permission. That silence must end.
The UN Human Rights Council should convene an emergency session dedicated to Iran's political executions. The mandate of the Special Rapporteur deserves stronger political backing and greater resources to preserve evidence before witnesses disappear and official records are destroyed.
The EU should impose targeted sanctions upon every judge, prosecutor, prison governor and intelligence official directly involved in politically motivated death sentences. Britain should lead that effort instead of waiting for others to act.
Defending human rights
The international media also carries responsibility. Every public hanging deserves front-page coverage. Every political prisoner awaiting execution deserves a name, a face and a story. Tyranny flourishes in darkness. Public scrutiny remains one of the few protections available to prisoners held in Evin, Ghezel Hesar and countless detention centres across Iran.
The Iranian people have displayed extraordinary courage through repeated uprisings despite bullets, torture, and the threat of execution. Their struggle deserves far more than sympathetic speeches. It deserves solidarity. It deserves sustained international attention. Above all, it deserves democratic governments willing to defend human rights with deeds rather than declarations.
If the free world continues averting its gaze while Tehran's cranes lift another young protester above another public square, history will record far more than the executioners’ crimes. It will also remember those who possessed every opportunity to speak, every means to act and every reason to defend freedom, yet chose silence while the nooses tightened.
Struan Stevenson, a former MEP and chair of the Friends of a Free Iran Intergroup, is an author and international lecturer on the Middle East
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