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Verisheh Moradi, a dissident 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 November 2024, she was sentenced to death for “armed rebellion against the state” (baghi), and her allegations of torture and other ill-treatment were never investigated. Her appeal before the Supreme Court is pending.

On 1 August 2023, Ministry of Intelligence agents violently arrested Verisheh Moradi in Sanandaj, Kurdistan province, and subjected her to enforced disappearance for nearly four months by refusing to disclose her whereabouts to her family. In an August 2024 open letter from prison, Verisheh Moradi revealed that agents subjected her to torture and other ill-treatment during arrest. She wrote that she was held in a Ministry of Intelligence detention facility in Sanandaj for 13 days in solitary confinement, where according to an informed source, agents subjected her to gender-based violence before transferring her in August 2023 to section 209 of Tehran’s Evin prison. She wrote that there, agents held her in prolonged solitary confinement for over four months and interrogated her without a lawyer. She added that agents subjected her to torture and other ill-treatment, including execution threats, to compel her to make forced “confessions” about taking up arms with Kurdish groups against the Islamic Republic of Iran, which she has repeatedly denied. In late December 2023, she was transferred to the women’s ward of Evin prison.