Iran was supposed to offer limited pardons or commutations to some Iranian prisoners, including some protesters swept up in recent mass demonstrations, state news media reported on Sunday, but the move offered little hope of freedom for the vast majority of political prisoners.
Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, will release or reduce prison sentences for tens of thousands of prisoners, including people arrested in recent demonstrations and people convicted of other crimes, several state-controlled news outlets said. But the long list of caveats made it doubtful whether many protesters would benefit, prompting human rights activists to call the amnesty a sham: the announcement said it would not apply to someone convicted of a number of serious charges, such as it rights groups say most protesters .
Excluded are people convicted of, among other things, espionage, armed actions, murder or assault, membership in certain groups, contact with agents of foreign intelligence services or destruction of public property, according to the state-controlled Fars News Agency. Also disqualified, it said, were prisoners convicted of being “an enemy of God” – a charge leveled against most of the 19 protesters confirmed by the New York Times been executed or were now on death row.
Other inmates are only released “after expressing remorse and promising not to repeat these security-related crimes,” Fars said.
Hadi Ghaemi, executive director of the Center for Human Rights in Iran, said while it is difficult to judge the government’s pledges before seeing the results of the amnesty, at most a small number of low-level protesters could be released.
The protests in Iran
The death of a young woman named Mahsa Amini in the custody of the vice squad sparked a nationwide uprising against theocratic rule in Iran.
“The pardons appear to be more propaganda than actually addressing the large number of political prisoners,” he said. “We should really focus on the fact that there is something on the order of 10,000 political prisoners in Iran. While they are in prison, these pardons are really not essential or effective in addressing the protesters’ grievances.”
Iran’s jails and courtrooms were already overcrowded before the protests began, and Mr Ghaemi suggested the pardons were a way for judicial authorities to sort out some of the most minor cases in order to focus on higher-priority prosecutions.
Cities across Iran erupted in protest in mid-September after the death in custody Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old Kurdish Iranian woman who was arrested by morality police for allegedly violating Iran’s conservative Islamic dress code. The uprising was directed first against these rules, then against the entire Iranian leadership. For months, Iranians demanding a new secular system engaged in a bloody struggle with their authoritarian leaders, who tried to crush them with bullets, punches and arrests.
Human rights groups say security forces have killed at least 500 people, including 50 children, since the protests began. The United Nations speak of at least 14,000 arrests. But with courtrooms closed to outsiders and the government silent on the crackdown, Sunday’s announcement appeared to be rare official confirmation that many people had been arrested in what Iran calls the “riots.”
Iran has accused foreign countries and its spies of instigating the demonstrations while making few real concessions to the protesters. Iran indicated some confidence that it would prevail in the amnesty announcement, with Fars describing the protests as “coming to an end”.
Aside from the ongoing unrest in Sistan-Baluchistan, an impoverished region to the east, the street protests that rocked Iran have subsided amid the executions and violence. Even as the government prepared to release some prisoners, other actions showed it was not letting up the pressure, fueling the anger of many ordinary Iranians.
On Sunday, authorities arrested a journalist whose twin sister, also a journalist, was already in prison for covering Ms Amini’s funeral in September.
Meanwhile, the government stoked anger by dispatching riot police to north-west Iran, where thousands have been left stranded in the cold after a devastating earthquake in Khoy last week, despite blocking the arrival of crowd-sourced aid.
And on social media in recent days, Iranians have reacted with horror to photos of an emaciated Iranian rights lawyer, Dr. Farhad Meisami, detained since 2018 and on hunger strike for four months.
It seems unlikely that limited pardons will calm such anger or satisfy protesters who have been calling for Ayatollah Khamenei’s ouster. He offers an amnesty around this time every year to mark the anniversary of the 1979 Islamic Revolution; normally it does not cover political prisoners.
The head of the Iranian judiciary proposes the criteria for the amnesty every year.
“During recent events, due to hostile propaganda and indoctrination, some, especially young people, have committed crimes and misbehaved, causing trouble to themselves and their families,” Gholamhossein Mohseni-Ejei, who now heads the judiciary, wrote to Ayatollah Khamenei this year the amnesty, according to the state news media. “But now that the plans of foreign enemies, counter-revolutionary groups and those against the people are being exposed, many of them express their regret and ask for forgiveness.”
