“Architects of Atrocities”: Amnesty Says Iran Committed Crimes Against Humanity in 2022 Crackdown

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Four years ago today, the Woman, Life, Freedom uprising erupted in Iran after the death in custody of Zhina Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old Kurdish woman who had been arrested by Iran’s “morality police.” Over the next three months, hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets protesting against Iran's discriminatory compulsory veiling laws.

Amnesty International has released a new report concluding that the repressive measures used by Iranian authorities to crush the Woman, Life, Freedom protests in 2022 constitute crimes against humanity. Investigating the killings of 377 protesters and bystanders in 2022, Amnesty International's report calls for international criminal investigations into 87 Iranian officials.

“Crimes against humanity are system crimes. This means that they require resources, organization, structures, and state policy,” says Raha Bahreini, a human rights lawyer and researcher on Iran for Amnesty International, which also recently condemned the U.S-Israeli war on Iran. “We've been very clear that the suffering of victims of crimes against humanity must not be instrumentalized or weaponized by actors such as [the] U.S. and Israel,” she adds.

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