Calls grow in Iran for independent inquiry into protest death toll

Calls are growing inside Iran for an independent inquiry into the number of people killed during recent protests after the government said it would oversee the publication of the names of the deceased.The highly unusual government move, announced on Thursday, is designed to head off claims that crimes against humanity have been committed and that as many as 30,000 Iranians have been killed. Iran’s official death toll released by the Martyr’s Foundation is 3,117, including members of the security services.Iranian reformists said the planned government identification process was not sufficiently transparent and unlikely to end the dispute about how many people had been killed.Mohsen Borhani, a law professor at Tehran University and a critic of the Iranian government who has served time in Evin prison, said the government proposal to identify the dead publicly was a positive development because in previous major protests, Iranians “faced an absolute lack of information regarding the deceased and injured”.Borhani said the best way to achieve transparency was to create a website and announce the names of the deceased “so that the information is not one-sided”.“Citizens should be able to publicly and openly upload names and information about the deceased without being identified. The site should then commit itself to verifying and providing necessary information about each announced name.”One difficulty is that families willing to identify a fatality risk facing retribution, especially if they insist their family member was killed by the security services.In a sign that many Iranians believe the death toll is far higher than the official claim, the Tehran teachers union issued a statement demanding the release of all detainees, claiming “in less than a week one of the bloodiest chapters of repression in contemporary Iranian history has unfolded. Tens of thousands of children, women and women have been drenched in blood.”Ahmad Zeidabadi, a reformist analyst, said distrust between the state and society had grown “so deep and wide” that many people no longer accepted official data.He said the best solution would be to allow the United Nations to send an unimpeachable fact-finding team to Iran.Writing on his Telegram channel, Zeidabadi asked: “Why not entrust this task to a legitimate international body so that the opposition forces and countries cannot easily cast doubt on it?”A screengrab from a video posted on social media on 14 January shows bodies lying on stretchers outside the Forensic Diagnostic and Laboratory Centre in Tehran. Photograph: UGC/AFP/Getty ImagesThe Reform Front, an alliance of reformist groupings that worked to secure the election of the president of Iran, Masoud Pezeshkian, also called for an independent committee “to investigate this unprecedented disaster and present a transparent and candid report to the Iranian nation”.The reformist lawyer Ali Mojtahedzadeh said the government had to address the root causes of the distrust by building a stronger civil society.In his first intervention, the former president Hassan Rouhani said the protests led by a generation born and raised in the Islamic Republic showed the need for major change. He called for the formation of political parties and an end to the filtering of electoral candidates.Separately, an unofficial committee has been set up to identify all those still in detention, as security services continue their sweeps through the country looking for what they describe as the ringleaders of the protests. No official number exists for those in detention, but it is believed to be in the tens of thousands.The number of children under 18 being held has not been released, but teaching union websites are publishing the photographs of every child that has been verified as killed. Government officials have also been photographed visiting detainees.Lawyers have told Iranian media that the majority of those arrested were born between 1980 and 1985, and were the main breadwinner in the family. Initial sentences of two to five years are being issued. Many are from working-class families and cannot afford the bail money required.