UN consultants and 400 distinguished ladies have urged Iran to not execute Zahra Tabari, a 67-year-old electrical engineer and ladies’s rights activist.
Ms Tabari was arrested in April and accused of collaborating with a banned opposition group, the Folks’s Mujahideen Organisation of Iran (PMOI), in accordance with her household.
In October, she was convicted of “armed rise up” by a Revolutionary Courtroom in Rasht after a trial through video hyperlink that lasted lower than 10 minutes. Her household mentioned the decision was based mostly on extraordinarily restricted and unreliable proof: a bit of material bearing the phrases “Lady, Resistance, Freedom”, and an unpublished audio message.
Iranian authorities haven’t but commented on the case.
At the very least 51 different individuals are identified to be going through the dying penalty in Iran after being convicted of nationwide safety offences together with armed rise up, in addition to “enmity towards God”, “corruption on Earth” and espionage, in accordance with the UN consultants.
The UN Human Rights Council’s particular rapporteurs on human rights in Iran, violence towards ladies and arbitrary executions, in addition to the 5 members of the working group on discrimination towards ladies and women, warned in a joint statement that Ms Tabari’s case confirmed “a sample of significant violations of worldwide human rights legislation”.
She was arrested throughout a raid on her dwelling and not using a judicial warrant, and was interrogated for a month whereas held in solitary confinement and pressured to admit to taking over arms towards the state and to membership in an opposition group, in accordance with the consultants.
Ms Tabari was denied entry to a lawyer of her selecting and was represented by a court-appointed lawyer, they mentioned, including that her dying sentence was issued instantly after a short listening to.
“The extreme procedural violations on this case – together with the illegal deprivation of her liberty, the denial of efficient authorized illustration, the terribly transient trial, the shortage of sufficient time to arrange a defence, and using proof that seems inadequate to assist a cost of [armed rebellion] – render any ensuing conviction unsafe,” they mentioned.
Additionally they famous that worldwide legislation restricted the dying penalty to essentially the most critical crimes, which means intentional killing.
“To execute Tabari underneath these circumstances would represent arbitrary execution,” the consultants added. “Criminalising ladies’s activism for gender equality and treating such expression as proof of armed rise up constitutes a grave type of gender discrimination.”
Greater than 400 distinguished ladies – together with a number of Nobel laureates, the previous presidents of Switzerland and Ecuador, and former prime ministers of Finland, Peru, Poland and Ukraine – additionally signed a public attraction for Ms Tabari’s fast launch on Tuesday.
“Iran is in the present day the world’s primary executioner of girls per capita. Zahra’s case lays naked this terror: in Iran, daring to carry an indication declaring ladies’s resistance to oppression is now punishable by dying,” it mentioned.
The attraction was organised by Justice for the Victims of the 1988 Bloodbath in Iran, a UK-based group that represents the households of the 1000’s of political prisoners who had been executed in Iran three a long time in the past.
One other Iranian girl, Kurdish rights activist and social employee Pakhshan Azizi, can also be going through the dying penalty on the identical cost as Ms Tabari.
UN consultants have beforehand mentioned Ms Azizi’s sentencing gave the impression to be “solely associated to her legit work as a social employee, together with her assist for refugees in Iraq and Syria”.
In response to Iran Human Rights (IHR), not less than 1,426 folks – together with 41 ladies – had been executed in Iran within the first 11 months of 2025 – a 70% improve on the identical interval final 12 months.
Virtually half of these put to dying as of the top of November had been convicted of drug-related offences, whereas 53 had been convicted of nationwide safety offences, the Norway-based group mentioned.
