Makau Mutua

In June 2012, after over five years of planning, the Iran Tribunal held a Truth Commission at Amnesty International’s Human Rights Action Centre in London, and in October 2012 the Tribunal had further hearings of evidence and legal submissions in The Hague. The Iran Tribunal campaign modelled their work on the famous Russell Tribunal of the 1960s (that dealt with international humanitarian law violations and war crimes committed in the Vietnam War) but there was one crucial difference: the Iran Tribunal was not to be a product of partisan intellectual outcry alone. It was to reflect the evidenced sufferings of many individuals at the hands of a brutal and totalitarian authority.Other than in the case of the Russell Tribunal, the founders and organisers of the Iran Tribunal were not philosophers and writers concerned with war crimes that had gone unaccounted for by both the international organisations and the media of the time. This Tribunal was, instead, initiated by hundreds of families of political prisoners who were imprisoned, tortured and executed en masse in the 1980s (1360s) and by prisoners who survived these massacres. Some hundred witnesses participated in the two stages of the proceedings and presented testimonies pertaining to the treatment they and others had been subjected to during the 1980s, a period in Iran known as the ‘bloody decade’. In these pages, there is an account of proceedings constituting a trial of the Islamic Republic of Iran. The witnesses, legal team, volunteers and participants sought to document the experiences of witnesses, against the dominant narrative of the state that had persecuted them and their loved ones so violently since the dawn of its reign.