Iranians and supporters of the Iranian Resistance in Canada staged demonstrations on Saturday, June 4 in the center of Toronto as well as in front of the federal parliament in Ottawa to protest the rising tide of executions and the grave human rights violations in Iran.
The participants announced their solidarity with political prisoners in the Iranian regime’s dungeons and called for condemnation of the mullahs’ inhuman regime by the international community and the United Nations.
Iran’s fundamentalist regime has publicly hanged at least 118 people since April 10. Three of those executed were women and two are believed to have been juvenile offenders.
Ms. Farideh Karimi, a member of the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI) and a human rights activist, last week called for an urgent response by the United Nations and foreign governments to the recent spate of executions and the appalling state of human rights in Iran.
Iran’s fundamentalist regime earlier in May amputated the fingers of a man in his thirties in Mashhad, the latest in a line of draconian punishments handed down and carried out in recent weeks.
The National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI) said in a statement on April 13 that the increasing trend of executions “aimed at intensifying the climate of terror to rein in expanding protests by various strata of the society, especially at a time of visits by high-ranking European officials, demonstrates that the claim of moderation is nothing but an illusion for this medieval regime.”
Amnesty International in its April 6 annual Death Penalty report covering the 2015 period wrote: “Iran put at least 977 people to death in 2015, compared to at least 743 the year before.”
“Iran alone accounted for 82% of all executions recorded” in the Middle East and North Africa, the human rights group said.
There have been more than 2,300 executions during Hassan Rouhani’s tenure as President.
The United Nations Special Rapporteur on the human rights situation in the country in March announced that the number of executions in Iran in 2015 was greater than any year in the last 25 years. Rouhani has explicitly endorsed the executions as examples of “God’s commandments” and “laws of the parliament that belong to the people.
