The Right to Life and Human Dignity: Values Erased under the Islamic Republic of Iran

For more than four decades, the conduct and policies of the Islamic Republic have involved widespread and organized violations of human rights. These policies conflict with the United Nations Charter, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and related international conventions.

Over recent decades, the UN General Assembly and related bodies have repeatedly condemned systematic violations of the rights of Iran’s people. The document argues that, because these resolutions lack enforcement, the Islamic Republic has ignored their recommendations and intensified practices including execution, torture, arbitrary detention, and forced confession.

Iran remains among the countries with the highest number of executions. Citing human-rights reporting, the document states that by 18 Mehr 1404 (8 October 2025) at least 1,100 people had been executed, around 65 on political and security charges.

It names Eskandar Bazmandegan, Mohammad Kashefi, and Mehran Bahramian among people detained and killed after holding memorial ceremonies for their brothers.

Authorities have often refused to return victims’ bodies to their families and buried them at undisclosed locations. Under international law, the document characterizes this as enforced disappearance and a crime against humanity.

It also describes physical and psychological torture to obtain forced confessions; intolerable and inhuman prison conditions; pressure on prisoners’ families; denial of medical treatment; and deliberate indiscriminate shooting of border couriers and fuel carriers in ethnic regions—practices it calls silent state killings.

Marginalized and impoverished children are among the most vulnerable victims of discriminatory policy. Thousands in poor regions are denied education, healthcare, and social services because they lack birth certificates or recognized nationality.

Although Article 30 of the Islamic Republic’s constitution requires free education through secondary school, widespread poverty, inadequate facilities, and official neglect have kept many children out of school.

Exclusion from education and lack of legal identity—citing a Human Rights Activists News Agency report that one million people under fifteen were out of school in 1404—violate the fundamental right to live with dignity and reproduce poverty, illiteracy, and social harm across generations.

Violations of personal and social freedom continue to increase. Freedom of thought, expression, belief, and religion is severely repressed.

Bahá’ís, dissidents, LGBTQ people, and religious minorities face arrest, property confiscation, and even execution.

The document notes that many Bahá’í properties have been confiscated and businesses sealed.

It cites Mona Mahmoudnejad, aged seventeen, who was executed with nine other Bahá’í women solely for their religious beliefs.

Although Articles 18 and 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights affirm freedom of belief and expression, even a simple expression of opinion in Iran can lead to arrest, torture, or social exclusion.

Independent activity by teachers and workers is also harshly repressed.

Quoting Narges Mohammadi, the document states that after the Woman, Life, Freedom movement hundreds of labor and professional activists were arrested and more than 300 teachers dismissed.

Sharifeh Mohammadi, a labor activist, is cited as having been arrested and sentenced to death for attempting to organize workers.

Failed economic policies, widespread corruption, international sanctions, and the use of national resources for military and regional projects have driven an expanding livelihood crisis and structural poverty toward collapse.

Millions now live below the poverty line and face severe shortages of water, electricity, gas, and health services.

The UN Charter, meanwhile, affirms that governments have a duty to safeguard the security, welfare, and livelihood of their citizens.

Poverty, unemployment, rising prices, and despair have left many families unable to meet their most basic needs and driven many specialists, physicians, nurses, and other skilled citizens to emigrate.

Iranian society lives amid pervasive fear, psychological insecurity, and the continuing erosion of human dignity. Children and young people face a future without meaningful civic rights or a credible path toward a secure and worthwhile life.

The repression of protests, threats and arrests directed at civic activists, shootings of demonstrators, media censorship, and the absence of free expression have produced deep public despair.

Iran faces connected crises across the economy, education, health, the environment, and civil liberties. Experts have warned that continuation of this course risks accelerating social and economic collapse. Government should allow people to live without fear, in dignity and security; the Islamic Republic has instead deepened darkness and despair through domestic repression and confrontational foreign conduct.

A transition to a free and humane society requires independent transitional-justice courts and truth commissions. These bodies would enable families seeking justice to testify, establish the truth about crimes, torture, and arbitrary executions, and rebuild the foundations of justice and social trust.