Pope Francis Condemns Iran’s Use Of Death Penalty For Protesters

Iran hanged two men on Saturday for allegedly killing a member of the security forces during nationwide protests that followed the death of 22-year-old Kurdish Iranian woman Mahsa Zhina Amini on September 16, drawing condemnation from the European Union, the United States and other Western nations.

"With the executions, the Iranian regime is employing the death penalty as a means of repression," Scholz wrote on Twitter. "That is horrifying."

He said Iran should refrain from further executions after the killings of 22-year-old Mohammad Mehdi Karami and 39-year-old Seyyed Mohammad Hosseini, whose deaths bring the number of executions linked to the protests to four.

"Together with our international partners, we will increase the pressure further on the Iranian regime," the government spokesperson told a regular news conference, adding that Iran needed to see that there would be a price to pay for continuing.

A German foreign ministry spokesperson said the goal was to agree a fourth package of sanctions with other European Union member states in response to the crackdown.

European lawmakers and activists are demanding that the EU list Iran’s Revolutionary Guard as a terrorist organization. A group of French Senators have tables a resolution to end nuclear talks with Tehran aimed at reviving the 2015 nuclear deal, the JCPOA.

With reporting by Reuters

The foundation in a statement on Monday said The Olof Palme Prize 2023 will be given to imprisoned Iranian human rights activist Narges Mohammadi, Eren Keskin, a human rights lawyer in Turkey who was sentenced to six years in prison, and Marta Chumalo, a Ukrainian women's rights activist.

“Throughout their lives and through their actions, these three women, along with many of their colleagues, have inspired others and paved the way for courageous young women and men to continue fighting for the fundamental human rights,” said the statement.

“Narges Mohammadi is a journalist and human rights activist who has been struggling for women’s rights and freedom of speech in Iran. Her involvement has led to her repeated arrest, and she has served several prison terms,” wrote the Olof Palme Foundation.

The Olof Palme International Center is a Swedish non-governmental organization and Labor Movement's cooperative body for international issues. The center's areas of interest include democracy, human rights and peace.

The center is named after the late Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme. Olof Joachim Palme was a Swedish politician and statesman who served as Prime Minister of Sweden from 1969 to 1976 and 1982 to 1986. He was assassinated in 1986.

The annual Olof Palme Prize is awarded to people chosen by the fund’s board. The prize consists of a diploma and 100,000 US dollars.

The ceremony will be held in the Stockholm Concert Hall on February 1, 2023.

Khamenei, who is facing the most serious challenge to his rule since 1989 when he became Supreme Leader, claimed that protesters are not angry about government inefficiency, managerial and economic weaknesses, but on the contrary the antigovernment movement is meant to weaken a strong Islamic Republic.

Popular protests broke out in mid-September when a 22-year-old woman was fatally wounded after being arrested by Iran’s notorious ‘hijab police’. After years of economic decline, increasing poverty and government interference in the private lives of citizens, the incident triggered pent-up frustrations that blew up in street demonstrations.

But unlike previous rounds of unrest, the government was not able to crush the protests in a matter of days and the demonstrators were not asking for reforms but demanding a regime change. Nevertheless, security forces killed more than 500 civilians and arrested close to 20,000 people by the end of December. The government has also hanged four protesters after sham trials, triggering Western condemnations, and isolating the clerical regime.

“In the recent riots, the hand of foreigners was visible, although some have denied it. As soon as we say foreign enemy, some deny it,” Khamenei said, referring to domestic pundits and politicians that say the protesters have genuine grievances.

‘Foreign enemy’ is a favorite term for the 83-year-old authoritarian ruler, who is a staunch opponent of the West and believes he is the leader of the Muslim world, although as a Shiite cleric he cannot be accepted by most Muslims, who are Sunnis.

‘The enemy’, usually refers to the United States, Israel, Western Europe and even some Arab countries – in short, whoever disagrees with Khamenei’s quest to dominate the region, eradicate all manifestations of Western presence, and destroy Israel.

Khamenei attributes almost all political and economic failures and shortcomings to conspiracies by ‘the enemy’, and the ongoing protests are no exception.

He began blaming foreigners as early as September and his loyalists and media controlled by hardliners immediately tuned their propaganda to his message.

“Actions by America, by Europeans…each somehow intervened in this issue [protests] in an obvious manner, not hidden from view,” Khamenei said.

The United States and Europe only gradually increased their criticism of Tehran as the story of Mahsa Amini, the woman killed by the ‘hijab police’ spread around the world and garnered sympathy, the West began to react. Reports of teenage protesters being killed by trigger-happy regime forces in the early weeks of the protests brought on more and more Western criticism.

Khamenei went on to blame international, Arab and Hebrew media for propaganda in favor of the protests. Here is where, he claimed that the protests were meant to weaken the Islamic Republic and had nothing to do with its shortcomings. It was “the strengths” they wanted to destroy, he claimed.

Khamenei’s Islamic Republic has survived with oil export income for more than three decades and US sanctions imposed on its crude exports since 2018 have further weakened a shaky economy. Millions of middle-class citizens have become poor as inflation has reached nearly 50 percent and the national currency has lost its value more than tenfold in five years.

Khamenei has refused to resolve his differences with the West over Iran’s nuclear program seen as a threat by many countries. But parts of his speech Monday revealed what could be interpreted as anxiety over the political and economic deadlock his regime faces.

“Big works should be accomplished. Transformational work must get done. I believe it can be done. We have pious, hardworking officials,” Khamenei said and reminisced about the 1979 revolution that toppled the monarchy.

The problem is that millions of people now reject that revolution and aspire to establishing a secular and democratic country.

Danish Foreign Minister Lars Lokke Rasmussen told Ritzau news agency on Sunday that Iran's ambassador in Copenhagen will be summoned to convey the Danish government's anger at the Islamic Republic's aggression against its people.

The Danish Foreign Ministry also told AFP that the meeting will take place on Monday.

Meanwhile, Belgian Foreign Minister Hadja Lahbib wrote on Twitter that she was "horrified" by the executions.

“Together with likeminded EU member states, we will summon the Iranian ambassador. New EU-sanctions are on the table,” reads her tweet.

On Saturday, the judiciary of the Islamic Republic executed two protesters, Mohammad Hosseini and Mohammad Mehdi Karami, on the charge of allegedly participating in the killing of a Basij member named Ruhollah Ajamian.

The execution of the two men came after a hasty trial and without their right to choose a lawyer. Many jurists and human rights activists described the trials as “unfair” and questioned the verdicts.

Dutch Foreign Minister Wopke Hoekstra wrote on Twitter Saturday that he was “appalled by the horrible executions of demonstrators in Iran,” and that the ambassador of the Islamic Republic in Amsterdam will be summoned.

He also said that the fourth EU sanctions package is being prepared, which will be discussed at the next meeting of the EU Foreign Affairs Council.

The executions drew widespread Western condemnations.

With Radan's track record as the heavy-handed former police chief of Greater Tehran, Kordestan and Sistan-Baluchistan provinces the appointment was immediately questioned by social media and foreign-based Persian media.

Most of Radan's ill reputation dates back to his role as police chief during the post-election unrest in 2009 and the performance of his men at the Kahrizak detention center where several young protesters including children of some state officials were killed as a result of police brutality. He was interrogated for long hours for the casualty toll of the post-election unrest.

Like many other intelligence and police officials, Radan is a veteran of the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s and in essence an IRGC officer.

Radan's men were also seen in police vehicles running over the protesters in the streets of Tehran on several occasions in 2009 and 2010. There is also a famous audio recording posted on social media in which Radan is ordering his men in Tehran to shoot anyone they can among protesters.

Clearly his ruthless treatment of demonstrators and his violent enforcement of the compulsory hijab are among the reasons why Khamenei decided to bring him back from his comfort zone or possibly his exile at the police's Strategic Studies Center to the troubled and turbulent streets of Iran.

Radan was sanctioned for his human rights violations by the United States as early as 2010 and has been blacklisted by the European Union.

The right man for Khamenei

During the past month the press speculated that Khamenei was unhappy with former police chief Hossein Ashtari's performance in quashing anti-regime protests. Although Khamenei said that Ashtari left his post at the end of his term of office, the press revealed that he had still more than two years to serve.

According to Etemad Online, Radan's hard-line views about security make him the right man to serve alongside a consolidated conservative government. He has been known for his ultraconservative positions about hijab and security since the time he joined the IRGC as a young man. He served as the Police Chief of Kordestan, a challenging region, from 1997 to 2000. Then he worked until 2004 as the police chief of Sistan-Baluchistan, another difficult area with a porous border, poverty and an oppressed Sunni population. He was transferred to Tehran in 2005 as the police chief of Greater Tehran and served until 2009.

He was one of the pioneers of enforcing a religious dress code through the ‘morality police’ where he expressed strict opposition to men wearing ties and women wearing boots and tight manteaus. President Ebrahim Raisi referred to this in his congratulatory message to Radan's. IRGC-linked Javan newspaper also praised Radan for tackling the hijab issue in the past years.

Radan has said that his "success" in that role was due to targeting the hijab issue right at clothing production centers where "the enemies were silently attacking religious values." He shut down many barber shops in Tehran for introducing new hair styles for the youth. Nonetheless, his strongest point, as far as Khamenei was concerned, was his violent crackdown on the 2009 protests. An experience that could come handy in the turbulent period of 2022 and 2023.

A man of no apologies

Radan says that "success" was the outcome of the police's close cooperation with Basij and the Intelligence Ministry, Rouydad24 reported. The two organizations provided the plainclothes forces who would recognize no barrier whatsoever in violently cracking down on protests.

Iranian media have said that Radan has come back to the forefront of tackling the protests with more power than before. Many Iranians still remember him in a controversial interview on state television in which he dismissed all the criticisms about his performance and insisted that "I am absolutely serious about security and hijab. People know what is right and what is not, and we know what to do if we want to take people with us and they refuse to come with us."

However, what happened to Mahsa Zhina Amini in police custody in mid-September showed that nothing is yet clear about what the police may and may not do. Some say former police chief Ashtari was removed from his post because he could not convince anyone, including Khamenei, that his plainclothes agents could stop the protests, although they beat and shot protesters at point blank range, and are responsible for hundreds of deaths since September.

What Radan will probably begin to understand during the next months is that today's protesters are extremely different from those in 2009. Instead of turning the other cheek they might slap back his men in the face.