Zara Kazemi’s son urges Germany to arrest sick Iranian ayatollah

Shahroudi is receiving medical treatment for a reported brain tumour at a hospital in Hanover, Germany — a fact that had been kept secret until it was revealed by Iranian exiles and confirmed by the German government this week.

“For over a decade, Shahroudi presided over widespread, systematic human rights abuses, of which the Kazemi case is just one instance,” said Payam Akhavan, a professor of international law at McGill University and a former United Nations prosecutor.

“Thousands of political dissidents, journalists, bloggers, human rights lawyers have gone through the revolutionary justice system and ended up in the torture chambers or on the gallows, and all under the direction of Mr. Shahroudi as head of the judiciary.”

The hope is that Germany’s justice ministry will agree to charge Shahroudi with crimes against humanity before he leaves the country.

Stephan Hashemi, Kazemi’s son, told the Star on Tuesday that he has written to the German government expressing his desire to see charges laid and offering his assistance to prosecutors should it be required.

He has also urged Canadian authorities to intervene.

“My mother was unlawfully detained, brutally interrogated, tortured and killed by the Iranian regime. None of the individuals responsible for these unforgivable crimes have ever been held to account,” he said in a statement.

“This is an important first step toward a certain justice for my mother and for the overwhelming number of other individuals who were tortured, raped and killed by this regime.”

Germany is already facing sharp criticism over its decision to let Shahroudi into the country to receive medical care. Iranian dissidents have protested outside the hospital.

Volker Beck of Germany’s Green Party said he, too, has filed a criminal complaint, alleging that Shahroudi is complicit in “mass-murder activity.”

“Germany should not be a sanctuary for such people, who in their country persecute people for political or religious reasons and threaten them with death,” Beck said, according to The National, a newspaper in the United Arab Emirates. “The Iranian regime persecutes women, homosexuals, ethnic minorities and atheists.”

The Reuters news agency quoted a spokesperson for the German prosecutor’s office as saying: “The complaint has been received and it is being examined.”

Akhavan said Ottawa should also push diplomatically for Shahroudi’s arrest.

“The man who was implicated (in Kazemi’s death), Saeed Mortazavi, was basically the direct subordinate of Mr. Shahroudi,” he said.

Mortazavi was a prosecutor with the Islamic Revolutionary Court and was accused by the Iranian parliament in 2003 of trying to cover up details of Kazemi’s death and intimidating witnesses to change their stories.

A spokesperson for Global Affairs Canada could not comment on the government’s involvement in, or support of, the initiative to bring charges against Shahroudi.

“The point is that Canada should be on top of this,” Akhavan said. “One of its citizens was brutally raped and tortured and murdered, and Canada should have been the first to request Shahroudi’s arrest and extradition.”

Instead, he said, it has been left to an international group of volunteers to assemble the testimony and documentation needed to support a charge of crimes against humanity.

“We have a number of highly credible witnesses that have direct familiarity with the role of Mr. Shahroudi presiding over the revolutionary courts that sent numerous victims to torture chambers and the gallows,” Akhavan said. “The evidence is there, but we’re gathering it in an awful hurry.”

Supporting the request to the German government, he said, is a statement from 2003 Nobel Peace Prize winner Shirin Ebadi, Iran’s first female judge, who was celebrated for her work as a democracy and human rights campaigner in the country.