A Non-Governmental Organisation, named Iran Human Rights Monitor (Iran HRM) reported in June 2020 that Iran “saw tighter clampdown on political prisoners and prisoners of conscience and mistreatment of human rights advocates.”
The reports continues: “There have been reports on death sentences issued against young men for taking part in street protests, hand amputation sentences issued contrary to international law, lashing dissidents and prisoners being brutalized in Iran’s prisons...[and] continued horrendous executions, including of political prisoners, to tighten up the general social atmosphere,”.
The report further states: “Hedayat Abdollahpour, a Kurdish political prisoner and father of two who was on death row based on false charges since 2018, was among those executed. His family were informed on June 10 that their son had been secretly executed a few weeks ago in western Iran. Judicial and security officials still refuse to hand over the body of the 27-year-old political prisoner to the grieved family or provide information about his burial place. The execution was carried out even though one of the judges in the case had earlier told Hedayat’s attorney that he was innocent, and that the death sentence was a result of pressure from Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps,”.
On punishment of political prisoners, the report read: “The flogging sentence for Mohamamd Bagher Souri, detained during the nationwide November 2019 protests was carried out on June 8 in the Great Tehran Penitentiary, also known as Fashafuyeh Prison. On June 8, two men were flogged for taking part in the November 2019 protests in the city of Urmia, northwestern Iran. Azerbaijani rights activists Ali Azizi and Eliar Hosseinzadeh, were lashed 20 times for ‘disturbing public order’. On June 5, a man in southwestern Iran was flogged 55 times for criticizing and “refusing to apologize” to the local representative of the regime’s Supreme Leader. Ruhollah Barzein, who works in a bakery in Charam, Kohgiluyeh and Boyer-Ahmad Province was flogged due to complaints from Seyed Nourallah Afshar, Charam’s head of Friday prayers. On June 1, a Tehran bus driver and labor activist, Rasoul Taleb Moghadam, was lashed 74 times for taking part in a peaceful Labor Day gathering last year outside the regime’s Parliament”.
The report added: “A Revolutionary Court in southwestern Iran also sentenced a student to eight years in prison and 74 lashes for protesting Iran’s downing of a Ukrainian passenger plane. According to the sentence issued by the 1st Branch of the Revolutionary Court in Shiraz, Siavosh Nourozi Jafarlou was sentenced to seven years of prison for “assembly and collusion with the intention of disrupting internal security” and ‘insulting the leader Ali Khamenei".
Read the report here: