UN Expert Says Iran Used the War as Cover to Tighten Its Crackdown, With Executions That “Did Not Pause”

For eight months, Iranians have lived under two kinds of fire: air strikes from abroad and a crackdown at home. On Wednesday, a United Nations investigator told the General Assembly that the second has been as relentless as the first.

“What I report to you today is without precedent in the two years I have held this mandate,” Mai Sato, the UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in Iran, told the Assembly’s Third Committee in New York on October 28. She described “a population under military strikes while being threatened, arrested, tortured, forcibly disappeared and executed by its own authorities,” and warned that “what I present today is a fraction of what has occurred.”

Sato’s latest report covers February to August 2026. It argues that the conflict, which began with US and Israeli strikes on February 28, did not soften the Islamic Republic’s treatment of dissent but hardened it. “The war has provided cover for the authorities to intensify their crackdown and tighten the repression,” she said in a statement issued by the UN human rights office. “Safety from external attack and protection from human rights violations at home are not alternatives,” she added. “The people of Iran currently have neither.”

Executions in wartime

The starkest evidence concerns the death penalty. “Executions did not pause during the war,” Sato told delegates, according to the UN’s official summary of the session. She said at least 34 executions were linked to January’s nationwide protests, and gave the timeline of one mass trial: “34 adults were tried in five days; 12 were sentenced to death; 7 have been executed.” (For earlier TBR coverage, see our report on IRGC executions and the Iranian public.)

According to the UN human rights office, some hearings were held online and lasted minutes, and forced confessions were broadcast within days of arrest. Sato said that under an Iranian espionage law, sharing information with foreign media may be punishable by death. She also said witnesses had withdrawn their testimony out of fear. Cases such as Reza Zanganeh’s death sentence have drawn similar concerns.

Viviana Krsticevic, a member of the UN’s Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on Iran, spoke at the same session. She said the authorities had published a list of more than 3,000 people killed in the protest crackdown, and that the mission believes the real toll is significantly higher. At least 221 children were among the dead, the youngest four months old, and tens of thousands of people were arrested. “We are gravely alarmed that Iran further intensified the use of the death penalty in 2026,” she said. More than 100 people, including women and children, are on death row. The mission has concluded that many of the abuses amount to crimes against humanity.

Krsticevic also addressed harm from the other side of the war. The mission found that US and Israeli strikes on a school in Minab and a sports centre in Lamerd, which killed at least 178 people, more than 100 of them children, were war crimes.

Prisons under fire, families under pressure

Iran International, a London-based Persian-language broadcaster, reported further details from Sato’s presentation. According to its account, prisoners were left locked in their cells during air strikes, and families were threatened with prosecution and the confiscation of their property. Lawyers were summoned and threatened, and some were arrested. These details do not appear in the UN’s own summary and could not be independently verified. The outlet quoted Sato as saying, “The result is that there is no lawful way left to dissent.”

Sato called for a moratorium on executions and for the deaths she documented to be investigated. “What these three reports share is impunity,” she said in the UN human rights office statement.

The Guards’ fingerprints

The UN findings attribute the abuses to Iran’s “authorities” and security forces in general rather than to any single body. But cases documented this week put the intelligence arm of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps at the center of the pattern Sato described.

The Kurdish rights group Hengaw reported on Wednesday that Amin Pardal, a 23-year-old Baloch tailor from Iranshahr, has been sentenced to death after being held by the IRGC Intelligence Organization in Zahedan. Hengaw says the verdict rests on confessions obtained under torture, and that his family saw bruises on his body after two months without contact. Local community and religious leaders signed a statement saying he was at work when a police commander he is accused of killing died. The court branch and the exact charges remain unknown, and the account rests on Hengaw’s sources alone.

Hengaw also reported that IRGC intelligence forces raided a family home in Qazvin on Monday and rearrested Nemat Afshar, a protester who suffered an eye injury during the 2022 “Woman, Life, Freedom” uprising and has since sought justice. His whereabouts are unknown.

Tehran’s answer

Iran’s representative, identified by Iran International as Ali Karimi Magham, rejected the reports outright. He called the UN mechanisms “politically engineered instruments” and demanded that both mandates be terminated. He blamed the deaths on “the calculated hijacking of peaceful protests and their transformation into violent unrest,” and said: “Iran will neither submit to political blackmail masquerading as human rights advocacy, nor will it accept the systematic perversion of the principles upon which the international legal order was founded.”

Russia accused the mechanisms of advancing Western political interests, while Pakistan, Cuba, Belarus and Eritrea raised concerns over country-specific mandates. France condemned the lethal violence, Canada called for abolition of the death penalty and the release of detainees, and the Czech Republic raised threats against Radio Farda, the Persian-language service of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty.

Sato’s closing verdict left little room for Tehran’s framing. “This war has delivered nothing to the people of Iran; not safety, not rights, not freedom,” she said. More coverage is on our Iran news hub.

Sources

• UN Meetings Coverage and Press Releases, Third Committee session (GA/SHC/4452), October 28, 2026: https://press.un.org/en/2026/gashc4452.doc.htm
• Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, “Iran war has worsened repression while impunity persists, says UN expert,” October 2026: ohchr.org (text verified through the Mirage News republication below)
• Iran International, “UN’s Mai Sato details executions, mass trials in Iran crackdown,” October 29, 2026: iranintl.com (details on prisoners during air strikes, families and lawyers, the “no lawful way left to dissent” quote and the envoy’s name rest on this outlet alone)
• Hengaw, “Baloch political prisoner Amin Pardal sentenced to death,” October 28, 2026: hengaw.org (single source; not independently verified)
• Hengaw, “Nemat Afshar, eye injury survivor, rearrested in Qazvin,” October 28, 2026: hengaw.org (single source)

Additional sources

• Mirage News republication of the OHCHR statement: miragenews.com
• UN News, “UN fact-finding mission on Iran focuses on plight of civilians,” September 17, 2026: news.un.org