Nasrin Sotoudeh: Investigate Iranian Presidential Hopeful Ebrahim Raisi for 1988 Mass Executions

Ebrahim Raisi was responsible for the executions of thousands of political prisoners as part of the 1988 "death committee" in Iran. And now he is running for president.
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Prominent Iranian human rights lawyer and former political prisoner Nasrin Sotoudeh has strongly criticized the candidacy of Ebrahim Raisi in Iran’s May 19, 2017 presidential election.

“The competency of this candidate should not be approved for any reason until the events of 1988 are investigated and it is proven that he was not an accomplice,” she told the Center for Human Rights in Iran (CHRI). “In the meantime, we do have an audio file… that shows he did have a hand in those events.”

In 1988, Raisi was part of a four-man commission, later known as the “death committee,” that implemented the extrajudicial executions of thousands of political prisoners.

The victims, who had already been tried and were serving prison sentences, did not know they were facing death when they then faced the inquisition-like proceedings.

At that time, Grand Ayatollah Hossein Ali Montazeri, who was the heir apparent to the Islamic Republic’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Khomeini, condemned the killings, telling members of the committee: “I believe this is the greatest crime committed in the Islamic Republic since the [1979] revolution and history will condemn us for it…. History will write you down as criminals.”

Montazeri’s son, Ahmad, released the taped recording of that conversation in an audio file posted online in August 2016, bringing the massacre to the forefront of public memory.

That month he was sentenced to six years in prison by the Special Court for the Clergy for releasing the audio file.

While he did not personally prosecute Ahmad Montazeri, Raisi was the chief prosecutor of the court at the time of Montazeri’s conviction.

“When you add it all up, [Raisi’s] resume looks very bad… If the veracity of existing evidence is not discredited and his innocence is not proven, we cannot pretend nothing happened and allow this man to be a candidate for president,” Sotoudeh told CHRI.

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