Iran’s next president should face justice for his role in mass executions in the 1980s | Geoffrey Robertson

Ebrahim Raisi sat on a committee that approved the deaths of thousands of dissidents

Ebrahim Raisi, winner of Iran's presidential election, bears responsibility for the deaths of thousands of prisoners in Iranian jails in late 1988. He served as a prosecution member of a three-man death committee" - as prisoners later termed it - which ordered executions of male and female members of an opposition group, and then of males who were atheists, communists or otherwise leftwing apostates". Women in this category were tortured until they recanted, or else died after continual whippings.

Raisi, only 28 at the time, was Tehran's deputy prosecutor and alternated on the committee with his chief. Last week, facing questions on the subject, he claimed: All the actions I have taken have always been in defence of human rights against those who disrupted the rights of humans." In a lecture in 2018, he is reported to have referred to the killings as one of the proud achievements of the system".