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Humanitarian worker and civil society activist Pakhshan Azizi, from Iran’s oppressed Kurdish ethnic minority, is at risk of execution following a grossly unfair trial by a Revolutionary Court in Tehran, reports Amnesty International. In July 2024, she was sentenced to death solely in relation to her peaceful humanitarian and human rights activities, including assisting displaced women and children in north-east Syria. Her allegations of torture and other ill-treatment were never investigated.

On 4 August 2023, Ministry of Intelligence agents arbitrarily arrested Pakhshan Azizi from her family home in Tehran and subjected to her an enforced disappearance, a crime under international law, by refusing to disclose her whereabouts to her family. Agents had transferred her to Tehran’s Evin prison, which is under the control of the Ministry of Intelligence, and held her in prolonged solitary confinement for five months without access to a lawyer and her family. According to informed sources, during this time Pakhshan Azizi was subjected to torture and other ill-treatment during interrogations. Agents repeatedly told her that she had no right to live and threatened to execute her. They also subjected her to gender based violence in order to compel her to make forced “confessions” of having ties to Kurdish opposition groups, which she repeatedly denied. In early December 2023, she was transferred to the women’s ward of Evin prison.