‘Don’t execute’: Iranians demand end to death penalty in unprecedented online protest
Iranians have flooded social media to demand authorities halt executions in an unprecedented online outcry against capital punishment following recent death sentences.
After a judicial spokesman on Tuesday confirmed three young men were on death row after being convicted of violent offences related to protesting, Iranians rallied around the Farsi-language hashtag “don’t execute” to demand clemency.
Among the thousands to support the hashtag were scores of anonymous users but also celebrities and prominent figures, including outspoken former member of parliament Parvaneh Salahshouri.
“Let’s not forget that those three men have mothers as well,” she tweeted on Wednesday, in response to a new MP who had posted about having a baby.
The three condemned men Amirhossein Moradi, 25, Saeed Tamjidi, 27, and Mohammad Rajabi, 27, were part of nationwide protests last November against a rise in petrol prices. Amnesty International criticised their sentencing as unfair, saying they had been tortured.
Mehdi Hajati, a city councillor in Shiraz, used Twitter to ask authorities who they claimed to represent, “when all Iranians say with one voice: do not execute.”
On Instagram, director Asghar Farhadi shared a photo of the condemned men, with the English tag #StopExecutionsInIran.
The Farsi hashtag was used over two million times on Twitter and more than nine million times on Instagram, according to Shayan Sardarizadeh, a Farsi-speaking journalist for BBC Monitoring, who said many of the engagements were made inside Iran. “These are huge numbers for a one-day online campaign,” he wrote on Twitter.
NetBlocks, which tracks internet connectivity, reported significant disruption to service in Iran on Tuesday night, which some interpreted as a sign authorities were seeking to block access.
Authorities carried out three executions on Tuesday, including a former defence ministry worker accused of being a CIA spy and two Kurdish prisoners convicted of bombing a military parade. Iran puts more people to death than any country bar China and last week killed a man for drinking alcohol.
Some Iranians interpreted recent executions as a message against dissent at a time when authorities fear another outbreak of protests. “The judiciary has been handing out outrageous sentences,” said an Iranian journalist in Tehran, noting that authorities have “a history of using the death penalty to scare people off”.
“Anger and frustration has been piling up over the past few months,” the journalist told The Telegraph, speaking anonymously from fear of reprisals. “People are facing insurmountable uncertainty and authorities have failed to assuage public worries.”
Ordinary Iranians are struggling amid the Middle East's worst COVID-19 outbreak and biting US sanctions. The rial lost about 13 percent of its value against the dollar in June, the biggest fall since losing nearly half its value after US President Donald Trump withdrew from the Iran nuclear deal in May 2018.
“The Islamic Republic is currently facing its highest ever level of discontent and there are strong indications that Iran will experience post-pandemic unrest in the near future - something regime insiders even concede,” said Iran analyst Kasra Aarabi.
Despite being officially banned, there are an estimated two million Twitter users in Iran, who use VPNs to mask their location to access the platform.
The only major platform not banned in Iran, Instagram is by far the country’s most popular social media application. A top Iranian official told parliament this year that the application often takes up 60 to 70 percent of Iran’s bandwidth.
