‘State-sponsored theft’: UN representative calls out rising seizures from Iran’s Bahá’ís

Simin Fahandej told Iran International that pressure on the community had intensified following nationwide protests in January, fitting what she described as a longstanding pattern in which Bahá’ís are targeted during periods of crisis.

“Every single time that there has been a crisis in Iran, the Baha'i community is the first to be scapegoated,” Fahandej said, adding that confiscation of Bahá’í property had been a feature of persecution since the 1979 revolution.

Fahandej said hundreds of cases of persecution had been recorded since January across more than six provinces, while prosecutions of Bahá’ís had doubled from the previous year.

“These arrests and imprisonment of Baha'is isn't an incident,” she said. “It's a nationwide state-led campaign of persecution.”

Cash, gold, instruments

Thirteen United Nations experts earlier this month also warned of an increase in persecution of Bahá’ís in Iran, including allegations of torture and enforced disappearance, and said 57 members of the community were detained or imprisoned.

The warnings come amid a series of raids on Bahá’í families in the central city of Isfahan in which security forces seized cash, gold, household belongings, vehicles, musical instruments and equipment used by families to make a living.

More than 20 security agents simultaneously raided three homes on Monday belonging to Amin Tabyanifard, his mother Bahariyeh Askarinasab and his son Nima Tabyanifard, a source familiar with the matter told Iran International.

The source said plainclothes agents searched the properties from around 8 a.m. until about 1 p.m.

A combination image shows the homes of Amin Tabianifard, Baharieh Asgarinasab and Nima Tabianifard in Isfahan, Iran, after security forces raided the properties on August 24, 2026.

Askarinasab lives in a separate unit in the same building as Amin Tabyanifard, while Nima Tabyanifard lives in another neighborhood of Isfahan.

Agents searched the family’s musical-instrument workshop and seized its tools, equipment and specialized machinery, along with several valuable handmade instruments.

They also seized cash, gold, electronics, household belongings and numerous musical instruments. Authorities later sealed the family’s music and musical-instrument store.

The source said agents in one of the raids used violence, beat people present and made threats.

Nima Tabyanifard was ordered to report to the Isfahan Intelligence Department, while other members of the family received summonses to appear before a court located at Isfahan’s Dastgerd Prison.

Fahandej said some recent arrests and confiscations in other cases had been carried out without warrants.

“These arrests and confiscations, I have to make clear, have taken place entirely illegally,” she said. “They did not have warrants for confiscation nor arrest.”

She said security personnel had in some cases climbed over walls to enter Bahá’í homes.

“If this is not theft and stealing people's property, I don't know what is,” Fahandej said.

She described one case in which a parent was arrested in front of a two-year-old child, and another in which authorities deployed 14 guards, five vehicles and a representative of the prosecutor general to arrest one woman.

‘You didn’t learn your lesson’

In a separate Isfahan case, filmmaker and journalist Sepehr Atefi said security forces raided his parents’ home for the second time in several months.

Atefi wrote on X that eight male agents and one female agent spent more than six hours searching the property and his father’s workplace, including the soil in flowerpots and a bag of rice.

He said agents packed household possessions, including a television, vacuum cleaner and toolbox, along with gold, valuables, communications devices and children’s toys, into his parents’ own suitcases and bags before taking them away in a pickup truck. The family’s car was also seized, Atefi said.

Atefi told Iran International that the repeated raids were taking a psychological and practical toll on his parents.

“This incident and its recurrence can mentally exhaust them,” he said. “Confiscating their IDs and mobile phones can trap them in administrative bureaucracy for days and disrupt their daily lives.”

When his mother objected to the confiscations, agents told her: “These are illicit possessions,” and: “You didn’t learn your lesson the first time,” according to Atefi.

He interpreted the remark as meaning that the family had failed to change its religion and said they were being targeted because they were Bahá’ís.

Fahandej said such language made what she described as the discriminatory nature of the raids explicit.

“There is no other basis for any of these confiscations, arrests, raids ... other than the fact that they're Baha'i,” she said.

She said court documents in some prosecutions had also explicitly cited membership in the Bahá’í community.

“With the misuse of their state authority, they essentially steal Baha'is' properties with complete impunity,” Fahandej said.

Livelihoods targeted

Fahandej said the economic impact of the seizures was particularly severe because Bahá’ís already face restrictions on higher education and public employment.

“Baha'is in Iran are banned from universities,” she said. “Then they're also banned from public employment, so they can't be doctors or lawyers, teachers, and any form of public employment.”

That leaves many members of the community dependent on small businesses and home-based work, she said, making the confiscation of tools, equipment and businesses particularly damaging.

“The basic and modest livelihoods that they would be able to build through these small businesses, sometimes home businesses, are also confiscated.”

Fahandej said authorities had increasingly used Article 49 of Iran’s Constitution, which allows the state to confiscate wealth deemed to have been acquired through illicit means, to seize Bahá’í property under what she described as vague pretexts.

She also pointed to large bail demands as another form of economic pressure.

“Some of the bail amounts that we see actually becomes the equivalent of working for a hundred years in Iran,” she said, calling it “quite a devastating form of persecution.”

Property confiscation has a long history in the Islamic Republic’s treatment of Bahá’ís. Fahandej said community and individual properties were seized in the early years after the 1979 revolution, while Bahá’í institutions were banned from 1983.

Crackdown widens

Recent cases have extended beyond property seizures.

Fahandej pointed to Peyvand Naimi and Venus Hosseini-Nejad, two Bahá’ís arrested in Kerman in southeastern Iran in January whose coerced confessions were later broadcast on state television. The Bahá’í International Community said Naimi was tortured and subjected to mock hangings in detention.

“We saw the forced live confessions of two Baha'is on television, essentially to justify persecution against them and the entire community,” Fahandej said.

A Revolutionary Court in the northern city of Sari has also sentenced 12 Bahá’ís to prison terms and restrictions on their social rights. Six other Bahá’ís were recently arrested in Sari and Karaj, while a Bahá’í student at Islamic Azad University in Birjand was expelled and barred from continuing his studies because of his faith.

Unofficial estimates put Iran’s Bahá’í population at more than 300,000. The Bahá’í faith is not recognized under the Islamic Republic’s constitution, which recognizes Islam as well as Christianity, Judaism and Zoroastrianism.

Human Rights Activists in Iran said Bahá’ís accounted for about 62 percent of reported violations of religious minority rights in 2025.

Fahandej said the latest escalation was taking place as Iranians were already struggling with severe economic pressures.

“It's heartbreaking that amid an already difficult economic crisis in Iran, that the state-sponsored attack against the Baha'is is now sweeping the community, as they, together with all other Iranians, are already suffering,” she said.