The Massacre of Political Prisoners in Iran, 1988

As the world wonders what can be done with the leaders of Iran, this report by a leading UN jurist establishes that many of them - including the Supreme Leader - committed an international crime when they approved and carried out a secret massacre of thousands of political prisoners. This atrocity in 1988, hidden at the time from UN investigators, is now revealed in its full scope and horror, inviting the question of whether the very men capable of his level of lawlessness and barbarity against their own people can be trusted with nuclear power. Geoffrey Robertson QC meticulously unravels the fanatic theocratic thinking that led to the mass murder and identifies the judges, diplomats and politicians (most of them still in positions of power in Iran) who carried out and covered up this "final solution" to the problem of political dissent. He tells how "thousands of prisoners were blindfolded and paraded before the death committee which directed them to a conga line leading straight to the gallows. They were hung from cranes, four at a time, or in groups of six from ropes hanging from the stage of the prison assembly hall. Their bodies were doused with disinfectant, packed in refrigerated trucks and buried by night in mass graves the locations of which were (and still are) withheld from their families". Mr Robertson concludes that these killings were of greater infamy than the Japanese death marches at the end of World War II or the slaughter at Srebrenica, and he urges the UN to set up a Special Court to ensure that their perpetrators are similarly punished.