A complaint against three Iranian dignitaries, including the commander-in-chief of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), Hossein Salami, was filed with the Paris prosecutor’s office for “death threats and advocating terrorism”, announced the lawyer of six Iranian and Franco-Iranian plaintiffs, Thursday September 14.
In addition to the head of Iran’s ideological army, the complaint targets Iranian Intelligence Minister Esmail Khatib and Commander of the Revolutionary Guards’ Quds Force Esmail Qaani.
It calls into question public threats made by these three dignitaries between December 2022 and January 2023 against supporters of the protest in Iran, following the death of Mahsa Amini, on September 16, 2022, after her arrest by the morality police.
“Long tradition of death threats, stalking” of opponents
It targets in particular a statement by Esmaïl Khatib, delivered on December 13, 2022: “Anyone who played a role in the riots will be punished everywhere in the world.” Comments widely relayed at the time in the press and on social networks, according to the text of the complaint of which Agence France-Presse had a copy.
She also cites comments from Hossein Salami dated January 10, 2023 warning “the French and those responsible for Charlie Hebdo » to not “considering the fate of Salman Rushdie”the famous British writer pursued by a fatwa and victim of a serious attack in August 2022, from which he emerged alive.
“These threats constitute so many disguised fatwas” against opposition activists all over the world, Chirinne Ardakani, Franco-Iranian lawyer from the Iran Justice Collective, explains to AFP.
“The regime of the Islamic Republic and its agents maintain a long tradition of death threats, stalking and murders of exiled Iranian opponents on French and European soil”we can read in the twenty-two page complaint.
“Iranians, wherever they are, will continue to make themselves heard”
The six applicants have lived in France since the 1980s or have recently been exiled. They are filmmakers, journalists, writers or LGBT+ rights activists and are publicly engaged against Iranian power.
The filing of this complaint, essentially symbolic at this stage, takes place on the eve of the first anniversary of the death of Mahsa Amini, and the start of the uprising “Woman, life, freedom” in Iran. “It is a question of telling the Iranian authorities, who want to stifle dissent, that the Iranians, wherever they are in the world, will continue to make themselves heard”said M.me Ardakani.
“We are throwing balls, we are seizing all the possibilities that French law offers, but the final goal is to ensure that the perpetrators of abuses can be prosecuted and brought to justice in France”she added.
The Iran Justice Collective, an association based in France, has for a year been documenting the abuses and repression against demonstrators in Iran, which according to NGOs has caused hundreds of deaths and thousands of arrests.