EVIDENCE OF atrocities allegedly committed in Iran during the 1980s, when at least 20,000 opponents of the regime of Ayatollah Khomeini are believed to have been executed, will be heard at a three-day sitting of a special international tribunal in The Hague, starting tomorrow.
The Iran tribunal was set up in 2007 by survivors and relatives of victims of the regime that seized power after the fall of the shah in 1979. Among its founders was the late Prof Kadar Asmal, a human rights lawyer, anti-apartheid campaigner and lecturer at Trinity College Dublin for almost 30 years.
Nineteen witnesses are expected to give evidence to the hearings at the Peace Palace – home of the International Court of Justice – which will be overseen by eight experienced human rights judges, chaired by Prof John Cooper QC, and including Michael Mansfield QC.
A truth commission held in London in June heard 75 witnesses testify to a state-sponsored campaign of torture and political liquidation on a scale comparable to the massacre of 8,000 Muslim men and boys by Bosnian Serb forces in Srebrenica in 1995, or the purges which followed Gen Pinochet’s coup in Chile in 1973.
The 359-page report of the truth commission concluded: “These violations of human rights were devised, instigated and executed (or caused to be executed) by a single central authority, and, as such, the Islamic Republic of Iran is the only authority responsible for these acts.”
Iran has refused to co-operate with the tribunal – despite being invited to take part.
After the hearing in The Hague, the commission will consider whether the alleged abuses, to the extent that they constitute a pattern between 1980 and 1988, amount to crimes against humanity as defined by article seven of the Statute of the International Criminal Court.
As well as allowing eye-witness accounts to be aired in public for the first time, the tribunal – set up independently in the absence of an “official” judicial investigation – also aims to highlight the selective nature of what goes before the UN’s courts and special tribunals.
“It is what I would characterise – based on my past work with the UN in Bosnia – as ‘Iran’s Srebrenica’, a monumental atrocity which cannot remain unanswered,” said the tribunal’s chief prosecutor, Payam Akhavan, professor of international law at McGill University and formerly legal adviser to the prosecutor at the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia.
“This tribunal is a seminal moment in establishing the historical truth about a decade of mass atrocities,” he added.
“Instead of being punished, the perpetrators of these heinous crimes have been promoted to senior positions in government and on the supreme court.
“Without speaking truth to power, without accountability for past crimes, it will be difficult to move beyond the present culture of impunity and build a culture of human rights in Iran.”
According to Amnesty International, Iran executed 5,000 political prisoners during the summer of 1988 alone, following a fatwa issued by Ayatollah Khomeini.
The killings were “relentless and efficient”, it says, and included women and teenagers. “It is incredible that torture survivors and families of murder victims have managed to bring the tribunal to this stage, virtually on their own,” said John Cooper QC. “Equally, it is shocking that they have been forced to do it on their own. The UN did nothing.”
Sir Geoffrey Nice QC, a former prosecutor at the ICC and a member of the tribunal steering committee, agrees. “War crimes courts and tribunals established over the last 20 years have changed the way the world citizen thinks. That citizen may assume that, like national courts, they are part of a coherent judicial system that happens to be international. Nothing could be further from the truth . . . This is a conflict that would never be selected for international attention, despite its gravity. This informal tribunal shows what while the world citizen may hope that his courts will serve him well, he can find the means to do much of the job himself if they don’t.”
