Amnesty calls for investigation against Iranian president

Amnesty International has called for the new Iranian president-elect to be investigated for alleged crimes against humanity.

Long-serving judge Ebrahim Raisi won more than 60% on the vote on Friday, seeing off his pre-selected rivals in an election marked by historic low turnout.

The hardline current Chief Justice of Iran is set to be inaugurated in August, taking over from the more moderate outgoing administration of Hasan Rouhani.

But Agnes Callamard, Amnesty International’s secretary-general and formerly the United Nations’ special rapporteur on extrajudicial executions, has called for Raisi to instead be investigated for the “crimes against humanity of murder, enforced disappearance and torture”.

In 1988, nine years after the Islamic Revolution that saw in Iran's current theocratic political system, Raisi was serving as a deputy prosecutor in the capital, Tehran.

He and three other officials were selected by the country's then-leader, Ayatollah Khomeini, to sit on an entity known as the Tehran 'death panel' or 'death commission'.

Khomeini had ordered the mass execution of leftists and resistance groups being held in prisons across Iran after the end of the Iran-Iraq war. In late July 1988, 'death commissions' were formed across the country to decide prisoners' fates based on their political allegiances.

More than 2,800 people were hanged and shot by firing squad across Iran in the first fortnight, including 750 to 950 in Tehran's prisons of Evin and Gohardasht.

A second, unquantified wave of killings then took place that September, this time based on the remaining prisoners' adherence or non-adherence to Islam.

The executed prisoners' bodies were buried by night in mass graves and their location has not been revealed to families in the decades since.

Callamard said on Saturday: "That Ebrahim Raisi has risen to the presidency instead of being investigated for the crimes against humanity of murder, enforced disappearance and torture, is a grim reminder that impunity reigns supreme in Iran."

“The circumstances surrounding the fate of the victims and the whereabouts of their bodies are, to this day, systematically concealed by the authorities, amounting to ongoing crimes against humanity.”