A court in the Iranian city of Qom has sentenced a woman to 50 lashes for kissing and hugging a man in a cafe, after her husband filed a complaint and submitted video of the meeting, according to the rights group HRANA. She denies the charge.
The verdict, issued on October 10 by Branch 119 of Qom’s Criminal Court Two, found that her conduct amounted to “an illegitimate relationship or an act against chastity other than adultery,” HRANA reported.
According to the ruling, the court examined the footage and found it showed what the verdict described as “kissing and hugging an unrelated man.” The images, the ruling said, also showed her celebrating a birthday at the cafe and presenting a cake to the man.
The woman denied the charge at her hearing. The court rejected her defense and said in its ruling that the video had not been made with Photoshop or artificial intelligence.
It sentenced her under Article 637 of the Islamic Penal Code, which allows up to 99 lashes for a man and woman who are not married to each other and who engage in “illegitimate relations or acts against chastity other than adultery.” The article lists kissing among those acts.
The court also cited Article 638, which punishes the public commission of acts deemed forbidden under Islamic law. She can appeal to Qom’s provincial appeals court within 20 days of being notified of the verdict.
Qom, about 140 kilometers south of Tehran, is Iran’s main center of Shia clerical learning.
International human rights bodies consider flogging a breach of the prohibition on torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading punishment.
Iranian courts have handed down lashing sentences in recent years to striking workers, civil activists, artists and protesters, and many have been carried out. Amnesty International has called for a halt to the lashing sentences passed on the singer Parastoo Ahmadi and eight others involved in her online concert, which an appeals court upheld last month.
Iran has executed a 28-year-old Iraqi man convicted of spying for Saudi Arabia, a charge he denied, according to the Oslo-based group Iran Human Rights.
Iran has executed a 28-year-old Iraqi man convicted of spying for Saudi Arabia, a charge he denied, according to the Oslo-based group Iran Human Rights.
Ayoub Mohammad Nabil, from Haditha in western Iraq, was hanged on Sunday morning at Lakan Prison in Rasht, the capital of Gilan province on the Caspian coast, the group said. Iranian officials and domestic media had not reported his sentence or his execution by the time it was announced.
Nabil had entered Iran legally on his passport and was working as a caretaker at a private villa when Intelligence Ministry agents arrested him in the nearby town of Fouman on August 26, 2025. He had no prior security record, Iran Human Rights said.
A source told the group he was held for about five months at the Intelligence Ministry’s detention center in Rasht, where he was subjected to severe psychological torture. He denied any link to Saudi Arabia or groups tied to it, and said he had been accused because he was a practicing Sunni Muslim, wore a beard and taught the Quran to local children in his guardhouse.
Despite no evidence of any political activity, the source said, Branch One of Rasht’s Revolutionary Court sentenced him to death for “moharebeh,” or waging war against God, through spying for Saudi-backed proxy groups.
The Kurdish rights group Hengaw, citing its own sources, said Nabil was moved to solitary confinement for execution on October 8, as fighting between Saudi Arabia and Yemen’s Houthis intensified.
He is at least the 17th person executed in Iran on espionage charges this year, and the third Iraqi, according to Iran Human Rights. Thirteen were accused of spying for Israel or the United States; the other two Iraqis were accused of spying for an unnamed Arab country, and an Afghan man for an unnamed state. Fifteen of the 17 were executed after the war began in February.
More than 70 political prisoners have been executed in Iran since the January protests, and at least 20 more face execution on political charges, Iran International has found.
UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said in a report on Thursday that capital cases in Iran, especially security cases, involve systematic violations of fair-trial rights, including forced confessions, closed trials lasting minutes and restricted access to independent lawyers. He called for an immediate halt to executions.
The rights group HRANA said last week that at least 2,003 people were executed in Iran in the year to October 8, up 29 percent on the previous year.
A man accused of plotting an attack on Iran International journalists told a London court on Thursday that a man he identified as a Revolutionary Guards officer living in Britain threatened to kill him and his mother unless he obeyed.
Giving evidence at Woolwich Crown Court, Mostafa Sepahvand said the man, whom he named as “Ebi” and described as living in Wolverhampton, contacted him by video call in 2024.
Sepahvand said the caller showed him an Iranian flag and threatened to kill him if he did not listen. He told the court he had switched off his own camera during the call.
“He said we’re gonna kill your mother,” Sepahvand testified.
Sepahvand, 41, is on trial alongside Farhad Javadi Manesh, 46, and Shapoor Qalehali Khani Noori, 57. All three deny charges under Britain’s National Security Act.
Prosecutors allege the men gathered information for Iranian intelligence to prepare for serious violence against at least one target, with Sepahvand expected to carry out an attack. The alleged targets included Iran International journalists Mojtaba Pourmohsen and Kambiz Hosseini.
Sepahvand’s testimony expanded on his account that he acted out of fear, which prosecutors have rejected.
He said the contact came after a video showing him discussing dental treatment was posted on a clinic’s Instagram page in 2024. He described Ebi as active on TikTok.
Sepahvand said he initially did not respond to the threats but reacted when the caller mentioned his mother.Asked what happened afterward, Sepahvand said his car window was broken and people entered his home in Westminster and moved items inside.
He acknowledged that he had not seen who broke the window or entered the property, but said he believed the incidents were linked to his exchange with Ebi, whom he said had his address. He also told the court that his mother’s home was raided.
Earlier in his testimony, Sepahvand described years of police pursuit and alleged abuse of his relatives in Iran.
He said he fled to Tehran around 2014 and adopted his brother Masoud’s name because of charges brought against him by a judge. Police subsequently visited his family home in Khorramabad every week looking for him, he said.
Describing an incident in 2018, Sepahvand said police pushed his mother to the floor and his brother became involved in an altercation with officers before being taken to a police station.
Other family members then confronted police at the station, he said, and further arrests followed.
Sepahvand testified that his brother was released after 10 days but developed mental health problems and became intensely fearful. He also alleged that a relative named Ardavan was tortured and that Ardavan and another relative, Hassan, were later hanged on charges he described as opposing the Guards and being an “enemy of God.”
Prosecutors have previously argued that Sepahvand undertook the surveillance for payment and help resolving a criminal conviction in Iran. Earlier sessions examined messages in which he discussed a promised £150,000 payment and assurances that his Iranian case would be resolved.
According to the prosecution’s account of their defenses, Javadi Manesh and Noori accept visiting locations and taking photographs and videos but say they did not know they were assisting Iranian intelligence.
A Social Security hospital in Tehran has locked its main building and moved treatment into a cramped clinic in its courtyard, a member of the insurer’s healthcare oversight committee said, two months after officials listed it among the capital’s unsafe hospitals.
The main building of Shariat Razavi Hospital, run by the Social Security Organization, the state insurer that covers most of Iran’s workers and retirees, is deteriorating behind locked doors with its costly equipment still inside, Hossein Nategh told the labor-affiliated news agency ILNA on Thursday.
The move has turned a fully equipped hospital into what he called an outpatient clinic with the bare minimum of space, cutting the number of patients it can admit and the specialist care it can offer.
“The clinic set up in the yard has neither enough space for patients’ comfort nor the capacity to provide the services expected of a hospital,” he said.
The hospital’s equipment and funds belong to the workers and insured people who pay for them, Nategh said, and patients should not be left waiting in a cramped courtyard while the main building stands unused.
“If the building has a safety problem, why isn’t it being repaired? And if there is no plan to close it, why aren’t these resources being used?” he said. “This situation amounts to squandering the healthcare assets of the working community.”
He called for the main building to be reopened with its full equipment, or for an official explanation of why it was closed and what has happened to the equipment.
Neither ILNA’s report nor any statement from the Social Security Organization has explained why the building was closed or said what will happen to its equipment.
A list of unsafe hospitals
On August 18, Ali Nasiri, head of Tehran’s crisis management organization, named Shariat Razavi among 17 unsafe hospitals in the capital that were being made safe.
Warnings about the safety of Tehran’s buildings, hospitals among them, are not new. In 2024, the head of the city’s fire department said only 52 of the capital’s 189 hospitals had safety certification and that 125 were high-risk. In late 2025, a deputy fire chief, Kamran Abdoli, said 80,000 unsafe buildings had been identified in Tehran, about 27,000 of them high-risk.
Some of the warnings have ended in deaths. In June 2024, a fire at Qaem Hospital in Rasht, in northern Iran, killed at least nine patients with officials saying afterward that the hospital had never installed a fire suppression system despite earlier warnings. In early 2024, a fire broke out at Gandhi Hospital in Tehran, which fire officials said had received five safety notices beforehand and had faulty fire alarm and suppression systems.
Around the same time, Saeed Karimi, then the health ministry’s deputy for treatment, said about 100 hospitals were operating without a license because they had not fixed problems with safety or hygiene standards or with insurance contracts, and that closing them all at once would damage health services.
Nearly five decades after the 1979 Revolution brought an end to Iran's legal wine industry, the country retains vast vineyards and a centuries-old winemaking heritage but remains absent from a global wine export market worth $37.8 billion in 2025.
Iran has approximately 128,000 hectares of vineyards, just 31,000 fewer than Australia, whose wine exports were worth around €1.3 billion ($1.45 billion) in 2025.
The disparity reflects the disappearance of an industry from Iran's economy following the revolution, when the newly established Islamic Republic banned the production and sale of alcoholic beverages.
Grapes continue to be cultivated across Iran, including in Fars, Qazvin, Hamedan and Urmia, while Iranian raisins remain present in international markets. But an industry that could have generated exports, employment and tourism has remained absent for nearly five decades.
Historic wines of Shiraz
The name "Shiraz" is now one of the most recognizable in the global wine industry, although the grape variety has no proven genetic connection to the grapes historically cultivated in Shiraz, southern Iran.
The shared name has long fueled a theory that the Syrah grape originated in Shiraz, Persia, before reaching France. In 1832, Scottish viticulturist James Busby brought Syrah vines from France to Australia, where the variety eventually became known as Shiraz.
Genetic research later established the grape's French origins, although the precise evolution of the Australian name remains disputed. The historical association with Persia has nevertheless endured.
Wine is deeply embedded in Persian culture and literature. Words such as mey and badeh, both meaning wine, and saqi, meaning cupbearer, established an enduring presence in Persian poetry.
Wine produced in Shiraz enjoyed commercial recognition during the Safavid period, when English and Dutch merchants transported some of it through the Persian Gulf to India and other parts of Asia, primarily for their own consumption.
In 1665, Shah Abbas II granted the French East India Company permission to produce wine in Shiraz for its employees.
The tradition continued into the Pahlavi era. Before the 1979 revolution, wine production and sales were legal in Iran, with commercial wineries operating in the country.
The industry that might have been
Wine is more than the product of a vineyard. The industry extends from agriculture to factories, laboratories, glass bottle manufacturing, packaging, transportation, marketing, exports and tourism.
During the same decades that Iran's wine industry ceased operating, countries including Australia, Chile and New Zealand expanded their presence in the international market through investment in technology, education and branding.
According to the International Organisation of Vine and Wine (OIV), Australia had approximately 159,000 hectares of vineyards in 2025 and exported wine worth about €1.3 billion ($1.45 billion).
The comparison does not mean Iran and Australia have identical winemaking potential. Commercial winemaking requires suitable grape varieties, specialized equipment, established production standards and access to international export networks.
A hypothetical model based on OIV statistics and Australian industry data suggests that if 20 percent of Iran's existing vineyards were dedicated to growing grapes suitable for winemaking, annual wine production could reach approximately 125 million liters.
The estimate assumes an average harvest of seven metric tons of grapes per hectare and a conversion rate of 0.7 liters of wine per kilogram of grapes.
Under a hypothetical scenario in which Iran exported half of that production, divided equally between bottled wine at about $5 per liter and bulk wine at about $0.80, annual exports would be worth around $186 million at 2025 prices.
The figure is illustrative rather than a forecast. The calculation does not account for the cost of converting vineyards and building a wine industry, or the value of grape and raisin production displaced in the process.
Even with those limitations, it illustrates how part of Iran's existing agricultural capacity could have developed into an export-oriented industry.
Such an industry could also have generated employment across grape-growing regions, supporting agricultural workers, food-processing businesses, packaging plants, transportation companies and exporters.
A wine tourism destination?
In many parts of the world, winemaking has become an important contributor to tourism, attracting visitors and generating income beyond the vineyards themselves.
Bordeaux in France, Tuscany in Italy and Napa Valley in the United States are among the best-known examples of regions where vineyards have become tourist attractions alongside their role in wine production.
Shiraz, the capital of Fars province in southern Iran, would have had many of the ingredients for developing a comparable form of tourism, although revenues generated by established international wine regions cannot simply be applied to Iran.
The city and surrounding region already boast internationally recognized attractions, including Persepolis, the ancient ceremonial capital of the Achaemenid Empire, Pasargadae, the tombs of the Persian poets Hafez and Saadi, historic Persian gardens and distinctive local cuisine.
Vineyards, winery tours and opportunities to experience local food and wine could have complemented these attractions.
The name "Shiraz" itself could also have represented a valuable commercial advantage, although its international recognition in wine today is largely the result of Australia's successful industry.
Combining the international familiarity of the Shiraz name with the legacies of Hafez and Saadi, Persepolis, Persian gardens and the region's long history of winemaking could have helped establish a distinctive identity for local tourism.
Other grape-growing regions of Iran such as Qazvin province and the city of Takestan, as well as Hamedan and Urmia, could have established wine-producing regions based on their climates and traditions of grape cultivation.
Iran's lost opportunity extends beyond the wine that might have been produced. It encompasses nearly five decades in which investment, jobs, exports and tourism around such an industry were unable to develop.
Perhaps a glimpse of what such an industry might have become can be found in one of the most celebrated verses of Hafez, the 14th-century Persian poet whose name remains inseparable from Shiraz:
Come, let us scatter flowers and pour wine into the cup.
Let us break through the roof of heaven and devise a new design.
Iran has built impunity for the killing of protesters into its laws and judicial system, Amnesty International said in an investigation detailing how security forces accused of deadly violence can help determine whether their own actions were lawful.
Four years after the killing of Mahsa Jina Amini sparked the Woman, Life, Freedom uprising, Amnesty said official denial, firearms legislation, compromised judicial proceedings and government-appointed investigations had combined to shield those responsible for the 2022 crackdown from meaningful accountability.
The findings form part of Amnesty International's report Architects of Atrocities: State Machinery Orchestrating Crimes Against Humanity in Iran's 2022 Woman Life Freedom Uprising.
State denial and glorification
Amnesty identified six recurring narratives used by Iranian authorities and state-affiliated media to deny responsibility for the killing of protesters.
Authorities blamed unidentified individuals or protesters themselves, portrayed deaths as staged or attributed them to private disputes, illness, suicide, road accidents and other causes.
They also alleged that some victims had been killed during clashes involving armed opposition groups or while confronting security forces, without providing evidence.
According to the report, state institutions pressured families of those killed to publicly endorse the government's versions of events.
Amnesty found that authorities responded particularly rapidly to reports of women and girls being killed, circulating alternative explanations in an effort to prevent them from becoming symbols of the protest movement.
Senior judicial officials meanwhile publicly praised security forces involved in suppressing the demonstrations, which Amnesty said reinforced impunity and demonstrated a lack of judicial impartiality.
Laws protecting lethal force
Amnesty said Iranian law provides security forces with broad authority to use firearms against protesters, including at peaceful gatherings classified as unlawful.
Under the Law on the Use of Firearms, officers can open fire to disperse demonstrations deemed illegal when other measures have failed and a warning has been issued. Fewer restrictions apply to gatherings authorities classify as armed.
Amnesty said the legislation falls short of international standards restricting firearms to situations involving an imminent threat of death or serious injury.
The law also protects security personnel from criminal liability. Officers whose use of firearms is deemed lawful are exempt from civil and criminal responsibility, while compensation for an innocent person killed or injured can be paid by the relevant security institution rather than the officer.
Amnesty also highlighted legislation imposing severe penalties on armed forces personnel who refuse to use weapons or engage forces designated as enemies in certain circumstances.
The organization said the provisions could punish personnel for refusing to carry out military duties while shielding those who use lethal force in accordance with domestic law.
Security forces investigating themselves
Cases involving protesters killed by security personnel are handled within a military judicial system closely connected to the armed forces, Amnesty said.
A decree issued by Iran's supreme leader requires at least half of judges, prosecutors and administrative staff within the Judicial Organization of the Armed Forces to be members of the armed forces, including the Revolutionary Guards, police and army.
When shootings occur, an internal committee within the relevant security force assesses whether officers complied with firearms legislation. Military prosecutors and courts can then rely on those findings.
Amnesty examined 10 judicial cases across eight provinces involving protesters and bystanders killed during the 2022 uprising.
Four investigations were terminated because prosecutors said there was insufficient evidence to establish security-force responsibility. In two others, authorities acknowledged that security personnel had fired the fatal shots but still terminated criminal investigations.
Other cases resulted in convictions, but Amnesty said they demonstrated how convictions could subsequently be overturned, charges reduced or imprisonment replaced with financial compensation.
Supreme court intervention
Mohammad Jameh Bozorg was killed inside his home in Malard, west of Tehran, in September 2022 after members of the Basij paramilitary force raided the property.
Basij member Shahram Bazrbouy was initially sentenced to death under qesas, or retributive punishment, for shooting him in the face at close range.
After then-Revolutionary Guards commander Hossein Salami requested a judicial review, judiciary chief Gholamhossein Mohseni Ejei determined that the killing did not constitute intentional murder.
The Supreme Court subsequently overturned the murder conviction, sentenced Bazrbouy to three years in prison and ordered the Revolutionary Guards to pay blood money to the victim's family.
In another case, a death sentence against the police officer who killed Sepehr Biranvand in Khorramabad was twice overturned by the Supreme Court. The officer was ultimately acquitted of murder and sentenced to 10 months in prison for unlawful shooting.
Amnesty said an earlier court had cited CCTV footage showing the officer deliberately aiming at Biranvand as he fled, but the later ruling accepted his account that the shooting had been accidental.
Government investigations
Two days before the United Nations Human Rights Council voted to establish an independent fact-finding mission into the crackdown, then-Interior Minister Ahmad Vahidi announced the formation of a domestic investigative committee in November 2022.
Then-President Ebrahim Raisi established a separate special committee in May 2023, whose mandate was later extended by President Masoud Pezeshkian. Iranian authorities repeatedly cited the committee as justification for refusing to cooperate with the UN investigation.
Amnesty concluded that the committee's investigations lacked independence, impartiality and transparency.
More than two-thirds of its main 110-page report focused on accusations against foreign governments, media outlets and online platforms. Only 15 pages addressed allegations of human rights violations, with just half a page devoted to examining the deaths.
Amnesty also found that parts of the report repeated material published by Iranian intelligence and security institutions, including passages copied word for word from a joint statement by the Intelligence Ministry and the Revolutionary Guards' Intelligence Organization.
The organization said the committee had recycled official narratives rather than independently investigated allegations of unlawful killings, torture and other abuses.
Amnesty concluded that meaningful accountability would remain unattainable without fundamental changes to the laws and institutions responsible for investigating and prosecuting such crimes.
