14 Novembre 2018 :

by Maryam Rajavi
President of the National Council of the Iranian Resistance

The right to life is the principal right available to every human being and therefore violating it is the greatest of crimes. It is written in the Qur'an that killing a person is killing all men; a logic reported in other books and in the thoughts of many philosophers.
My homeland, Iran, has been the place of the most horrible hangings, for political reasons and not, by two dictatorships for a century: first the monarchical dictatorship, and the theocratic dictatorship later. Since the 1980s, 120,000 people have been hanged in Iran, including thousands of girls and women and even thirteen-year-olds, pregnant women and elderly women. Personally, in addition to my political experience, I have experienced this tragedy on my skin: one of my sisters was murdered in the early 70's by the shah and another, pregnant and together with her husband, by mullahs in 1982. The oppression of the Iranian regime is not limited to the hanging of women, the numerous discriminations, the inhuman punishments, up to the disfigurement with the acid on their faces with "the accusation of being ill-veiled", have made life an authentic hell for tens of millions of women.
Thirty years ago in this period, in the summer of 1988, 30,000 political prisoners were hanged following a Khomeini fatwa. This fatwa condemned to the gallows who was not willing to repudiate the people's Mojahedin.
Most of the hanged men had been sentenced to a few years in jail by the regime's own judicial system and were serving prison sentences and many had even already served their sentences. The hangings of the summer of 1988 were certainly a crime against humanity and genocide. With this massacre the mullahs' regime thought of freeing itself once and for all of its organized opposition.

The Iranian regime did not kill only in prisons, but considered it indispensable for its survival to do so even abroad against its dissidents. In recent years many dissidents of the Iranian regime have been murdered in Rome, Paris, Berlin, Vienna, Istanbul and Iraq.

Recently, two terrorist plans of the mullahs’ regime have been neutralized at the last moment: one in March in Albania, the other in France in June, with the intention in both cases to massacre dissidents.

On 1 September 2013 at the Ashraf camp in Iraq 52 members of the

People's Mujahedin, with their hands tied behind their backs, were murdered by the Iranian regime's killers.

It is not only the Iranian population subjected to this daily massacre; thousands of political prisoners in Iraq and Syria and hundreds of thousands of citizens, including innocent women and minors, have been hanged, murdered and decimated in these countries by the Iranian regime. Iran is the center of the perpetual violation of human rights and the right to life, and of ruthless hangings. Therefore, in order to fight against the death penalty, we must focus on the Iranian regime that truly inspires capital punishment and terrorism.

The Iranian Resistance, we have said it many times over and over again, wants an Iran where there is full respect for the right to life and the abolition of the death penalty and torture. In this situation the efforts of Hands Off Cain for the abolition of the death penalty are really important and will remain forever in the historical memory of humanity.

Maryam Rajavi