Amnesty International confirmed what many activists have been saying for months: – Islamic Republic engaged in systemic abuses of human rights and torture to punish protesters who objected to tripling of fuel prices last November.
According to Amnesty International, the clerical regime used “rape, enforced disappearance, torture and other ill-treatment” of those detained for involvement in the November 2019 unrest that shook the foundations of the Islamic Republic.
Amnesty’s report said Iranian security services used torture against detainees including “waterboarding, beating, flogging, electric shocks, pepper-spraying genitals, sexual violence, mock executions, pulling out nails and solitary confinement, sometimes for weeks or even months”.
Many of the tortured were forced into offering false confessions and received death penalty after appearing on “trial.”
Amnesty said it had confirmed 304 men, women and children killed by the security forces while Reuters put the death toll much higher, at around 1,500 people.
Amnesty also said detainees put on trial “suffered grossly unfair judicial proceedings” by being denied access to lawyers and forced to make confessions under torture. Dozens of protesters have been sentenced to long terms in prison.
The report quotes many survivors, including one who described the electroshock torture in detail:
“The electric shocks were the worst form of torture for me. One of my interrogators would instruct the others to ‘tickle him a little,’ by which they meant to administer a low voltage shock. But this so-called ‘tickling’ felt like my entire body was being pierced with millions of needles,” the victim reportedly said. “If I refused to answer their questions, they would raise the voltage levels and give me stronger electric shocks. Each time I was given one of these stronger electric shocks, it felt like there was an earthquake in my body … I would shake violently and there would be a strong burning sensation coursing through my whole body… To this day, I have continued to be affected.”
The extensive Amnesty report, titled, “Trampling Humanity: Mass Arrests, Disappearances, and Torture Since Iran’s 2019 November Protests,” confirms widespread reports in November and December of last year of Iranian police and military killing, torturing, and disappearing dissidents, particularly those of Kurdish and Turkic minorities.
Source: Amnesty