expected to be adopted in 2022 and which scores of people, including children, being would criminalize the production and blinded or sustaining other serious eye distribution of censorship circumvention tools injuries. and intensify surveillance. Over 700 petrochemical workers were Several thousand men, women and children unjustly dismissed for participating in were interrogated, unfairly prosecuted and/or nationwide strikes in June. arbitrarily detained solely for peacefully TORTURE AND OTHER ILL-TREATMENT exercising their rights to freedom of expression, association and assembly. Torture and other ill-treatment remained Among them were protesters, journalists, widespread and systematic, especially during dissidents, artists, writers, teachers and dual interrogation. Torture-tainted “confessions” nationals. Also among them were human were broadcast on state television and rights defenders, including lawyers; women’s consistently used to issue convictions. rights defenders; defenders of LGBTI Prison and prosecution authorities, working people’s rights, labour rights and minority under the judiciary, held prisoners in cruel rights; environmentalists; anti-death penalty and inhuman conditions characterized by campaigners; and bereaved relatives overcrowding, poor sanitation, inadequate demanding accountability, including for mass food and water, insufficient beds, poor executions and enforced disappearances in ventilation and insect infestation, and denied the 1980s. Hundreds remained unjustly many of them adequate medical care, imprisoned at the end of the year. placing them at greater risk of Covid-19. The decade-long arbitrary house arrest of Increasingly, the authorities transferred former presidential candidates Mehdi women prisoners of conscience to squalid Karroubi and Mir Hossein Mousavi, and the conditions in prisons far from their families in latter’s wife, Zahra Rahnavard, continued. reprisal for continuing to denounce human Dissidents and journalists based abroad rights violations while imprisoned. faced intensified threats, and their families in Leaked surveillance footage from Tehran’s Iran were interrogated and/or arbitrarily Evin prison in August showed prison officials 2 detained in reprisal for their work. In July, beating, sexually harassing and otherwise US prosecution authorities charged four torturing or ill-treating prisoners.4 Iranian agents for conspiring to abduct At least 24 prisoners died in suspicious Iranian-US journalist Masih Alinejad from US circumstances involving allegations of torture soil. In August, intelligence officials or other ill-treatment, including the denial of 5 interrogated the relatives of exiled Kurdish adequate medical care. human rights defender Arsalan Yarahmadi The Penal Code retained punishments and threatened him with death. Iranian- violating the prohibition of torture and other Swedish dissident Habib Chaab and Iranian- ill-treatment, including flogging, blinding, German dissident Jamshid Sharmahd, who amputation, crucifixion and stoning. In had previously been abducted abroad and February, Hadi Rostami was flogged 60 times returned to Iran, remained at risk of the in Urumieh prison in reprisal for his hunger death penalty. strikes against repeated threats that his Security forces deployed unlawful force, amputation sentence would be implemented. including live ammunition and birdshot, to Hadi Atazadeh died in Ahar prison in crush mostly peaceful protests. In July, at September after being flogged. least 11 people were shot dead during In October, a court in Tehran sentenced a protests over water shortages in Khuzestan man to be blinded in one eye under the and Lorestan provinces and scores were principle of “retribution-in-kind” (qesas) for 3 injured. On 26 November, security forces assault. fired metal pellets to disperse protests over water mismanagement in Esfahan, leading to Amnesty International Report 2021/22 198