Amnesty International: Advocating for Human Rights in Iran

Date: Tuesday, Feb. 11
Time: 4:30 pm
Location: Room 18, Edwards School of Business

This event is free and open to the public. 

About this event

Amnesty International created a Canadian Iran/Amnesty network that aims to abolish the death penalty in Iran. We are working with MPs, submitting petitions to Parliament, and working with Iranian lawyers. Soon, we will be working with Kurd, Baluch, and Iran Bar Associations, as well as other abolition networks. We are constantly revising strategies for better results.

Iran's executions — Amnesty reports nearly 900 in 2023 and tentatively over 900 in 2024 — are envisioned and expedited through its unique judicial system. Suspects are identified by means of its rampant security forces, informers, and surveillance systems. Those eventually sentenced to death begin with months and even years of detention, isolation, torture and more torture without charge, separation from family, no access to one's choice of lawyer, forced, often televised, confessions, disappearances, and a thoroughly rotten trial process that includes interference by clerics. This fits into the big picture of Iran's economic crises, its restive minorities, its systemic misogyny, its billions spent on foreign adventures throughout the Middle East, with catastrophic failure in Syria, and so on.

If Amnesty International can win the human rights battle in Iran, success with human rights will follow more swiftly elsewhere in the Middle East. Disrupting the autocratic formula in Iran makes such formulas harder to implement and sustain elsewhere.

Speakers:

• David Hedlin: Amnesty International member for over 40 years and founder of the Amnesty-Iranian Network
• Bill Rafoss: Former Chief Investigator at the Sask Human Rights Commission and former National Board Chair of Amnesty International Canada
• Amnesty International USask Chapter

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