No to Execution Tuesdays

Women incarcerated in Evin Prison in Tehran began their protest against the death penalty on Tuesday, 30 January 2024. The campaign of hunger strikes, now known as ‘No to Execution Tuesdays’, was begun by inmates on death row at Qezel Hesar Prison in Karaj a few days earlier. It has since spread to prisons throughout the country.

At least 1871 people have been executed in Iran so far this year. The total has risen each time I receive a note from human rights groups.

Narges Mohammadi, who was jailed in November 2021 and won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2023, was punched in the chest by an Evin guard during a protest in August 2024. She was released on medical leave a few months later, though forbidden from leaving Iran or seeing her twin children. She was detained again last week at a memorial for Khosrow Alikordi, a human rights lawyer, who was found dead in his office.

‘The only machine that’s working for the regime is repression,’ she told me a few weeks ago. Everything else, she said, has failed for the Islamic Republic. She said the prison guard who punched her knew of her heart condition: ‘I can’t pretend it was an accident.’

At another facility, Qarchak Prison, three women died in September after being denied medical care, according to human rights groups. One of them, 42-year-old Somayeh Rashidi, had been arrested in April. She was violently detained, with a barrage of blows to her face, legs and abdomen. The security officers smashed her head against the wall and sat on her chest. She was at first jailed in Evin but was transferred to Qarchak after Israel bombed the prison in Tehran.

Forty-five other women imprisoned in Qarchak wrote a letter to say they had witnessed Rashidi having multiple seizures but the officers returned her to a cell instead of taking her to hospital. ‘I do not use the word “death” when it comes to Somayeh Rashidi,’ Mohammadi said, ‘I use the word “killing”.’ 

In their letter, the Qarchak prisoners said that many others are in need of immediate medical attention and risk death from the repeated denial of care. The women who died in the same week as Rashidi were Jamileh Azizi and Soudabeh Asadi. Azizi, according to her cellmates, was taken to the infirmary with symptoms of a heart attack. The doctors said she wasn’t ill and sent her back to the wing. She died soon afterwards.

Qarchak was built as a poultry farm and later converted to a rehab facility for men. It became a women’s prison in 2010. When I interviewed human rights activists and the families of women transferred there from Evin, they described pest-infested buildings with no windows. Each of the former poultry sheds has capacity for up to a hundred prisoners but at times they have held six hundred. The overcrowding can be so bad that there isn’t enough floor space for women to sleep without curling up in the fetal position.

Children under two live in the prison with their mothers. A lawyer representing Qarchak’s prisoners has described broken ventilation systems and water and power outages. Those sick with communicable diseases aren’t quarantined and the seriously ill aren’t transferred to outside hospitals. A former staff member told a human rights group that the infirmary doesn’t even have a blood pressure monitor, oxygen tanks are often empty, the ECG machine is broken and there is no defibrillator. Prisoners are sexually exploited in exchange for food or cigarettes.

Pakhshan Azizi, a 41-year-old Kurdish human rights activist, was arrested and imprisoned in August 2023. In July 2024 she was sentenced to death for ‘rebellion against the state’ (baghi). Her brother Aso Azizi told me that she has endured horrific conditions. Having previously had several operations to remove ovarian cysts, she is still in pain. A vegetarian, at Qarchak she had little or nothing to eat and experienced severe weight loss. Back in Evin, she continues to be denied medical care.

She was kept in solitary confinement for several months and subjected to mock executions. ‘In order to confess to a crime I did not commit, I was hanged several times during interrogations,’ Pakhshan wrote in a letter. Despite the isolation, torture and denial of medical care, Aso says that his sister maintains a remarkably strong spirit.

Since Mohammadi’s arrest last week her family have said they are concerned for her well-being, as well as that of other prisoners. Zeynab Jalalian, the only woman in Iran serving a life sentence, and Maryam Akbari Monfared, who has served more than fifteen years, currently held in Qarchak, are among those being denied urgent medical attention. Human rights groups have renewed calls to save their lives.