Court Case In Sweden Implicates New Iranian President In Human Rights Crimes

Moussavi prepared a case file that included witness testimony and presented it to Sweden. Sweden has universal jurisdiction for violations of international law. The trial of Hamid Nouri began on August 10.  He is being prosecuted on charges of “war crimes” and “murder crimes” under the jurisdiction of the Swedish judiciary. Several witnesses will appear to give testimony to the court which is expected to end in late September.

Nouri worked as an assistant prosecutor in Iran’s prison system. In the summer of 1988, the Iranian leadership sent special teams of security and judicial officials known as “Death Committee” to the prisons to organize the executions of members of the opposition People’s Mujahadin. Thousands of prisoners were hanged, sometimes strung up on construction cranes for public viewing. Their bodies were buried in mass graves, their relatives forbidden from mourning them or visiting the grave sites.

A second wave of executions targeted political prisoners. His accusers say that Nouri was directly involved in these executions.

Mesdaghi endured time in an Iranian prison. He suffered in solitary confinement and did not have a lawyer, but he demands that Nouri gets a fair trial with proper legal representation, and he does not demand a death sentence.

“I’m fighting for justice,” he said. “Not just for myself but for everybody.”

If Hamid Nouri is proven guilty of the crimes against him, three questions need to be asked:

• Will the Swedish judiciary bring evidence from this trial to the International Criminal Court with a request that they study the findings of the case and bring Hamid Nouri to stand trial for international human rights and war crimes at The Hague?
• Will the European Union bring the result of this trial to the United Nations Human Rights Council and request a resolution against all those who participated in the mass murder of political opponents and protesters, including the new president of Iran?
• In light of a conviction and the implications against those in power in Tehran, will the United States include these human rights crimes against their own people as they consider lifting sanctions against the regime?

Finally, the United Nations will be commemorating the twentieth anniversary of their Durban Conference on Human Rights that was hijacked by thousands of anti-Israel NGOs who forced the official participants to pass an iniquitous “Zionism is Racism” resolution. It took Israel seventeen years to get this iniquitous act off the UN statute books.

It would go some way to recover the tarnished reputation of the UN if, instead of targeting Israel, they took up the challenge of demanding that criminal Iranian, including the newly crowned president, face human rights investigations over the killing of tens of thousands of Iranian citizens.