Two British citizens, Craig and Lindsay Foreman, have been detained by Iranian authorities, which accuses them of being spies. Unless released, the couple could spend years in jail and even face the death penalty – Iran executed around 901 individuals in 2024 alone, according to the United Nations.
While the arrest of the two British citizens could cause a diplomatic incident between London and Tehran, it will, hopefully, bring attention to Iran’s very unfair and severely biased “justice” system. Foreigners are regarded with suspicion and distrust by authorities, but the same attitude is applied to the general population, and particularly to non-Fars citizens, such as Azerbaijani Turks & Kurds, or members of religions other than Shia, like the Baháʼí Faith. One of the forms of pressure applied against thousands of political prisoners arrested and currently in detention centers and prisons is access to basic human rights necessities like adequate medical care or the possibility to contact family members.
Azerbaijani Turks constitute Iran’s largest non–Fars group, totaling 30% of the total population. They primarily reside in the northern part of the country, close to the border with Azerbaijan itself, mainly provinces like East Azerbaijan, West Azerbaijan, and Ardabil, though they also live in other provinces like Zanjan and Hamadan. Given the state’s paranoia that non-Fars groups, like Azerbaijani Turks, could attempt to secede from the country or demand autonomy (like Kurdistan in neighboring Iraq), Iranian authorities have historically treated them as “second class citizens.”
Hence, it is no surprise that Tehran will regularly arbitrarily arrest Azerbaijani Turks as a means of intimidation. The 2022 death of the Kurdish-Iranian woman Mahsa Amini sparked nationwide protests, and many Azerbaijani Turks joined the demonstrations. Many of them were subsequently arrested. However, Tehran is also proactive regarding arrests and has a strategy for them. For example, the state will arrest Azerbaijani Turk activists before certain anniversaries or events, or arrest moderate activists. Another strategy is infiltrating agents into civic movements and then using an organization’s communications records to draft bogus espionage charges. A major fear for any prisoner in Iran is being sent to the infamous Evin Prison, located in the Evin neighborhood of Tehran.
Throughout 2024, many Azerbaijani activists were arrested and charged with espionage, a common charge, colluding to disrupt the internal or external order, or spreading propaganda against the Iranian Republic. According to a Briefing for the United Nations by the human rights group Azerbaijan Human Rights Association (ArcDH) in 2024, Iranian authorities arbitrarily prosecuted around 250 Azerbaijani Turk activists. In early February 2024, eight activists were arrested across Ardabil, Karaj, Varamin, Miandoab, and Tabriz and promptly sent to Evin prison — though ArcDH put the number at 26 overall for the entire month. That same month, the cultural activist Murtaza Parvin was detained, and he was transferred to Evin prison. The activist Ebrahim Asemani was sentenced to three months and 30 lashes for “disrupting public order through unconventional attire and creating commotion during the funeral of Zohreh Sa’adati Vafaie.” Another recently imprisoned individual is the lawyer Mohammad Reza Faghihi, he was sentenced to five years this past January. The Council of Bars and Law Societies of Europe (CCBE), representing the Bars and Law Societies of 46 countries, sent a letter to President Masoud Pezeshkian requesting Faghihi’s release.
According to the HRANA news agency, six Azerbaijani Turks were sentenced this past October to a combined 53 years in jail for these types of charges. While some individuals were eventually released on bail, their records are inevitably damaged, and authorities are likely looking for another excuse to imprison them again.
In early January, the United Nations announced that “at least 901 people were reportedly executed [by Iran] in 2024, including some 40 in one week alone in December. At least 853 people were executed in 2023.” Liz Throssell, Spokesperson at the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR), explained that while most executions were due to drug-related offenses, “dissidents and people connected to the 2022 protests were also executed. There was also a rise in the number of women executed.” It is unclear how many Azerbaijani Turks or Kurds were executed, but given their participation in the 2022 uprising and Tehran’s history of repression against these groups, we can assume that some of them are in that 901 number. (To be clear, that number does not include individuals executed by Iranian forces and security agents. Hundreds of Baloch have been killed in an extrajudicial manner in Sistan and Balochistan province).
Iranian prisoners across 36 prisons are carrying out hunger strikes for the “No to Execution Tuesdays” campaign. According to the National Council of Resistance of Iran organization, “a group of inmates from Dieselabad Prison in Kermanshah” have joined the hunger strike. So far this year, over 60 executions have taken place this year, according to different sources. One person executed was the political prisoner Sharifeh Mohammadi, whose crime was to be a human rights defender with a focus on women’s and workers’ rights as well as the abolition of the death penalty. She was reportedly beaten while in prison, received an unfair trial, and was sentenced, based on forced confessions, of “armed rebellion against the state,” Amnesty International explains.
Sadly, another person who may be executed is the humanitarian aid worker Pakhshan Azizi, who happens to be a Kurd. The Iranian Supreme Court has rejected a request for a judicial review of Azizi’s conviction and death sentence. Branch 26 of the Revolutionary Court of Tehran sentenced Pakhshan Azizi to death in July 2024, accusing her of “armed rebellion against the state” due to her peaceful human rights activities. Several Kurdish political prisoners were executed in 2024 and convicted on charges like “waging war against God and corruption on Earth.”
The list of imprisoned Iranians is growing as in mid-February, Behnam Momtazi, a member of the Baha’i religious minority, started her two-year and one-day prison sentence. It is unclear what Momtazi was charged with, and whether he was really guilty or a victim of bogus charges, but Baha’is are “persecuted because of their faith and are often accused of being spies or opposing the Iranian government.” Even high-profile individuals are sent to jail with impunity. Case in point, Narges Mohammadi, a human rights activist, was imprisoned in 2016 for supporting civil disobedience against the mandatory hijab rules, and leading a human rights movement to abolish the death penalty. Mohammadi was briefly freed in 2020 but sent back to prison in 2021; she is currently in the infamous Evin prison. For her courageous work, she received the Nobel Peace Prize in 2023.
Haidir Khezri, an assistant professor at the University of Central Florida, correctly summarized the situation, “with hardliners maintaining their grip on parliament after the election held on March 1, 2024, the plight of ethnic and religious minorities remains an ongoing tragedy with no end in sight.”
Because of their nationality, it is plausible that the Foremans will ultimately be released by Tehran to avoid an international incident. However, it is worth noting that just last year, Tehran executed Jamshid Sharmahd, a German-Iranian political scientist. The Iranian government claims Sharmahd in a 2008 mosque bombing in Shiraz, Iran, a claim his family and the German government denied. Despite international condemnation not only of the executions, which France describes as an “unfair and inhumane punishment,” Tehran views arbitrary imprisonment and executions as valid tools to keep the population living in fear and in control. For Azerbaijani Turks, Kurds, and Baha’is in particular, being sentenced to prison in Iran equals a death sentence.
[Photo by Instagram]
The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author.
The author is a President of Second Floor Strategies, a consulting firm in Washington, D.C. He covers geopolitical, defense, and trade issues in Central Asia, Eastern Europe, and the Western Hemisphere.
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