The Current - The push for justice in Iran

Episode Date: January 26, 2026

In a special session of the UN Human Rights Council on Friday, former UN prosecutor Payam Akhavan said he has no doubt Iran "will have its Nuremberg moment." This comes as there are major discrepancies between the official death toll of people killed and the death toll from NGOs tracking the situation. We speak with Payam Akhavan about the human rights situation in Iran right now and what's at stake for the Iranian people.

Hey, it's me Gavin Crawford, host of the Because News podcast. If you're looking for some kind of group therapy for the news, well, we've got you. On Because News, I quiz the brightest and funniest Canadians about what's going on in the world, all in front of a live audience. So whether you spent the week quoting aphorisms of Thucydides or binge watching heated rivalry, we'll catch you up on the Canadian headlines. Follow us wherever you get your fine podcasts for free. This is a CBC podcast. Hello, I'm Matt Galloway, and this is the current podcast. At a special session of the United Nations Human Rights Council in Geneva on Friday,

prominent human rights lawyer and former international criminal tribunal prosecutor, Paiam Akavan, called the violence in Iran an extermination. By any plausible estimate, this is the worst mass murder in the contemporary history of Iran. Our beautiful country has become a cemetery in which the hopes of our youth are buried. The Iranian government has released its first official death toll from the protests. By its count, 3,117 people have been killed. That is far from the at least 4,560 people that the U.S.-based human rights activists' news agency says died in the protests. Payam Akavan is calling on the UN to renew the mandate for the independent fact-finding mission in order to monitor the situation in Iran.

Alongside his role as a lawyer, Payam is also the Massey Chair in Human Rights at the University of Toronto, founder of the Iran Human Rights Documentation Center, and he joins us now. Paiam, good morning. Good morning, Matt. You said that Iran, we just heard that, has become, in your words, a cemetery in which the hopes of our youth are buried. Tell me about what it's been like for you to watch the last few weeks. Matt, despite the internet shutdown by the Islamic Republic, which was no doubt intended to prevent news of these mass killings from getting outside of Iran. The information that we're receiving is truly shocking, even by the standards of the bloodstained record of the Islamic Republic. This is an unprecedented level of violence. On January 23rd, the day I was testifying

before the UN Human Rights Council, we received a report from a network of Iran. Iranian medical doctors who have gathered clinical and forensic reports of those who've been killed. And then there's a statistician at University of Munich who, based on very conservative estimates, extrapolated that at least 33,000 people have been killed within a span of just a few days. And I was a prosecutor in the Hague. I was involved in drafting the indictment for the Srebrenica genocide in July of 1995, in which 8,000 Bosnian Muslims were killed. So Iran has killed three to four times that number in half the time.

That is the scale. If I could provide another historical contrast, that is the number of people that were killed in Babiya, Ukraine, during the Holocaust. So this, my use of the term extermination, not as a descriptive term merely, but as a legal term, extermination is one of the specific categories of crimes against humanity that was recognized by the Nuremberg Tribunal in 1945, which now finds its way in the statute of the International Criminal Court. This is exactly the type of situation which is legally qualified as an extermination. So we're all in shock and deeply traumatized at the images of piles and piles of

black body bags in which mothers and fathers are coming to search for their children. Can you tell the story just very briefly? Because this isn't, we're not just talking about numbers. These are individuals behind those numbers. You mentioned the body bags, and you mentioned this in your statement to the United Nations. Just very briefly tell the story of the young man who he hid in one of those body bags. Yeah, this is an incredible story, a mother and father whose son went out to protest. Most of these protesters are teenagers or in their 20s. So when he didn't come back, they went to look for him in the hospital. They didn't find him there. Then they went to the notorious morgue in a place called Karizak in Tehran, where, you know, there are piles of bodies, you know, dumped like garbage on the floor. So they miraculously found their son badly in. injured by bullet wounds, but alive. And he had basically survived three days without water and food in a body back pretending to be dead because what happens is that the security forces very often

kill the wounded. They execute them in the head at point blank range. So he had pretended to be dead so he wouldn't be killed. So this was an incredible story of hope. against overwhelming odds, but sadly those miracles are far and few in between, and the overwhelming majority of people find the mutilated bodies of their children, and there is no happy ending if that situation I just described can qualify as such. You have said that Iran needs to have its Nuremberg moment. This is a reference, obviously, to the international criminal trials held against the leaders of Nazi Germany after the Second World War.

What would that look like for Iran? What sort of accountability do you see unfolding here? I ask you this as somebody who has, I mean, you've in the United Nations as a prosecutor, been involved in those sorts of trials. The first step in arriving at justice is the collection of the evidence. And the UN fact-finding mission, which we succeeded to establish in 2002 after the woman life liberty feminist uprising in Iran. is now gathering evidence for future legal proceedings. That's another major success that the resolution that was adopted last Friday refers to future legal proceedings.

Now, the reality is that Iran has not accepted the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court. No surprise there. Why would it want its own leadership to be prosecuted in the Hague? The Security Council could refer the situation of Iran, but is unlikely to do so because China, and Russia being allies of Iran would veto the resolution, and the United States even, because of the situation in Gaza, has now sanctioned the court. So now is not a good time for global justice. But the reality is that we are thinking about Iran's Nuremberg moment before a special court in Iran itself, because in any event, you cannot realistically arrest and prosecute the perpetrators

until they are no longer in power. And what is also important? important is that we now have generations of victims and families of victims from the very early days of the revolution when the mass executions began until the present. Over 47 years, tens and tens of thousands of people have been killed. So the demand of the families of the victims for justice has now become really a national demand. It has become a unifying theme. And the point is that clearly you cannot just sweep these crimes under the carpet, pretend they did not happen. And at the same time, we want to avoid the cycle of revenge. So justice is that space between vengeance and collective amnesia.

And I think it's important through raising this awareness to creating this movement to already set the stage for what may follow in the coming years. Where do you think Iran goes from here? There have been calls from some people within Iran for the crown prince, Reza Pahlavi, to return to the country. It's unclear how much support he would actually have for that, given the circumstances in which he fled from Iran. But where do you think the country goes from here? People have said when we were talking about this, as the protests unfolded, that this could be a turning point not just for the nation, but for the regime and the youth that were out on the streets. It is a turning point. Iran will never be the same again. After this level of horrific violence, this unprecedented scale of the mass murder in the streets, I think that even if in the short term, the Islamic Republic prevails in the long term, it has completely lost its legitimacy because you cannot indefinitely rule simply through terrorizing and killing people.

Now, where the country goes is, of course, a matter of speculation. My sincere hope is that there will still be a window of opportunity for a peaceful transition to democracy, although I must say sadly that that window of opportunity is shrinking fast because of the horrific violence that has been unleashed by a government that's not willing to listen to the basic demands and legitimate demands of people. But we must persist to do whatever is possible to achieve a non-violent, democratic transformation. And God forbid that Iran goes the way of Syria or Libya,

we must do everything possible to prevent such an outcome. I have to let you go, but just very briefly, what is its stake? We started in talking about those young people who bravely were out on the streets. What is its stake for them? moment, do you think? What is at stake for them is their future?

I mean, think about the number of Iranians that are in the diaspora today. When we came to Canada in the 1970s, there were barely any Iranians in Toronto, and today they call it Tehronto because so many young people, brilliant, highly educated, highly motivated, are leaving because they have no future. Meanwhile, the children of the hyper-corrupt elites whose fathers are chanting death to America are all in whatever New York, Los Angeles, Toronto, Vancouver, enjoying the ill-gotten wealth, leading very hedonistic lifestyles. So the young people are at the center of this movement and they just want hope for a better future. They want their basic human rights to be respected. They want to live in a country where there is a process.

the opportunity for progress. And time is on their side. Time is not on the side of the octogenarian fanatical clerics that are still recycling these stale revolutionary slogans of death to this and death to that. But sadly, sadly, our youth are being mowed down in the streets and we have to witness these horrific sights of these young, lifeless bodies in the morgue as the price to pay for freedom. Payam, I'm glad to have the chance to speak with you again about this. It's important. Thank you very much.

Thank you, Matt. Payam Akavan is a human rights lawyer, former UN prosecutor, also the Massey Chair of Human Rights at the University of Toronto and the founder of the Iran Human Rights Documentation Center. This has been the current podcast. you can hear our show Monday to Friday on CBC Radio 1 at 8.30 a.m. at all time zones. You can also listen online at cbc.ca.ca slash the current or on the CBC Listen app or wherever you get your podcasts. My name is Matt Galloway. Thanks for listening. For more CBC podcasts, go to cbc.ca.ca slash podcasts.