“The toll of the US and Israeli strikes in Iran continues to increase, with more than 3,000 reported fatalities,” the UN’s International Fact-Finding Mission (FFM) on Iran said on April 10. As well as the loss of civilian life, it also deplores “the scale of reported damage to civilian infrastructure and essential medical, scientific and educational institutions in Iran caused by US and Israeli airstrikes,” saying that “some of these attacks may amount to the war crimes of intentionally directing attacks against civilian objects or intentionally launching a disproportionate attack as defined under international humanitarian law”.
The latest and deadliest round of US-Israeli airstrikes on Iran began on February 28. Key demands are that Iran guarantees not to produce a nuclear weapon, that it stops supporting proxies in the Middle East – Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas in Gaza, Houthis in Yemen – which Israel sees as an existential threat, and that it guarantees free passage in the Strait of Hormuz. A temporary ceasefire was agreed on April 7 but remains fragile.
Composed of three international experts, the FFM was established by a Human Rights Council resolution of November 2022. Its mandate is to: “thoroughly and independently monitor and investigate allegations of recent and ongoing serious human rights violations in the Islamic Republic of Iran; establish the facts, circumstances and structural causes of such violations, including discrimination on grounds of gender, ethnicity, religion or belief and political views; and collect, consolidate, analyse, record and preserve evidence of such violations, to maintain and preserve the evidence that it has collected to date, and to ensure that all evidence is accessible for use in any independent legal proceedings.”
US-Israeli attacks investigated as war crimes
The FFM calls for a lasting peace and “impartial, effective and transparent investigations by the parties into allegations of international law violations and the prompt publication of the results of such investigations, including of the US Department of Defense’s investigation into the attack on the Shajareh Tayyebeh elementary school in Minab, Hormozgan province”. The FFM has launched its own investigation into the Minab school attack, which killed more than 170 civilians, of whom more than 100 were schoolchildren.
The FFM also says that “rhetoric by senior US Government officials that dismisses binding international law obligations, including statements on bombing Iran ‘back to the stone age’, attacking ‘all’ bridges and power plants and annihilating Iran’s ‘whole civilization’ (…), may be indicative of violations and crimes under international law”. The statement does not name US President Donald Trump, but it was he who threatened to wipe out “a whole civilization”.
Israel too has been accused of war crimes in Iran, particularly in relation to a strike on Evin prison in June 2025, which killed scores of civilians. In its latest report, covering the period from April 2025 to February 18, 2026 (ten days before the US-Israeli strikes started), the UN’s FFM says: “In relation to the attack on Evin prison compound, the Mission finds that Israel committed the war crime of intentionally directing attacks against a civilian object.” Israel is not yet known to have opened any investigation.
Glenn Payot of Impact Iran, a coalition of 19 Iranian and international human rights NGOs, welcomes the FFM’s decision to investigate the US strike on the school in Minab and all strikes on Iran’s civilian infrastructure. “It is important for the credibility of the UN that they also investigate that,” he says.
Human rights violations overshadowed by war
“During war, human rights violations don’t get attention and there is less political cost for the regime,” says Mahmood Amiry-Moghaddam, an Iranian exile in Norway who is director of the NGO Iran Human Rights. Since March 19, the Iranian regime has executed a total of 16 protesters and members of opposition groups, including two very young men, star wrestler Saleh Mohammadi and dual Swedish-Iranian citizen Kourosh Keyvani.
“The regime has of course always used the death penalty to create fear, but executions of political opponents have normally led to outrage from the international community and received a lot of attention from the public,” says Amiry-Moghaddam. “But that has changed, because all these violations are overshadowed by the war and the possibility of renewed war.”
He also says that since the beginning or the war more than 3,600 people have been arrested, and the Iranian regime has also launched a website to recruit child soldiers, calling for volunteers over 12.
This comes against a background of almost five decades of repression by Iran’s Islamic regime, targeted notably against political opponents, women and minorities. “After the revolution of 1979, the new regime started with revolutionary courts and the executions of the generals of the former regime, without any due process, and these revolutionary courts continued. Once they were done with the former regime officers, they started prosecuting minorities, political opponents, and they are still functioning,” says Amiry-Moghaddam.
The most violent crackdowns in recent years have been on the “Woman, Life, Freedom” protests that broke out in September 2022 in response to the death of Mahsa Amini, a young woman arrested for “improperly” wearing her hijab; and on protests that started in late December 2025, initially against economic hardship and then against the Islamic regime.
According to US-based Iran human rights monitoring group HRANA, more than 7,000 protesters were killed in the span of two days, on the 8-9 January 2026, while nearly 12,000 cases remained under review.
In its report, the UN’s FFM on Iran finds that many gross human rights violations by Iran amount to the crimes against humanity of murder, imprisonment, torture, sexual violence, gender persecution, enforced disappearance and other inhumane acts, committed as part of a widespread and systematic attack directed against a civilian population, namely women, ethnic and religious minorities, human rights defenders and perceived dissenting or opposing individuals.
It concludes that “the gross human rights violations and crimes under international law found by the Mission across its three successive mandates did not occur in isolation. Rather, they arise from a domestic legal framework that operates as a system to silence dissent, shield perpetrators from responsibility, and deny victims and their families their rights to truth, justice and reparations”.
It also finds that judges issuing death sentences relied on “torture-tainted evidence and presided over trials marred by serious fair trial violations”.
What hopes for international justice?
With little hope of independent justice in Iran, could victims take their cases to international courts? “There is a group of human rights lawyers on Iran who have submitted an Article 15 Communication to the Office of the Prosecutor at the International Criminal Court,” says Gissou Nia, a board member of Iran Human Rights Documentation Center – an NGO member of Impact Iran – and head of strategic litigation at US think-tank the Atlantic Council. “They’re asking for a Security Council referral. Obviously, it’s highly unlikely that would happen, given the presence of China and Russia. So I don’t see that moving ahead, but I do think that for purposes of the record, it’s important.”
Iran is not a member of the International Criminal Court (ICC), so the only way that court could open an investigation would be through a UN Security Council referral. Russia and China, which would likely support Iran, are permanent members of this Council holding veto powers, along with the US, UK and France. The US and Israel are also not members of the ICC.
While the ICC can try cases against individuals, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) – the UN’s highest court – rules on disputes between States. There is an ongoing case at the ICJ related to the downing of a Ukrainian aircraft, flight PS752, over Iran. But so far, no cases have been brought against Iran for core international crimes: genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes.
Universal jurisdiction: little justice to date
There have, however, been some initiatives under universal jurisdiction. “In December 2025, my team along with a group of victims from the ‘Woman, Life, Freedom’ protests three years ago submitted a criminal complaint in a court in Argentina under their universal jurisdiction framework, on allegations of crimes against humanity, gender persecution, murder, torture and other inhumane acts including intentional blinding,” says Nia. “This group of complainants includes two blinded victims, people who were shot with live ammunition, and someone whose 62-year-old mother was killed with hundreds of metal pellets because she was in the protests. That complaint is currently pending a decision on whether or not to open an investigation.”
She says this group is looking to supplement their complaint with allegations regarding the massacre of protesters on January 8-9 this year, which she describes as “not only unprecedented for Iran but one of the worst single-day massacres that has happened globally in contemporary history”.
One longstanding request is for countries including Canada, France, Sweden and Germany to open structural investigations, where “you don’t need any named perpetrator, you look at the structures that are responsible for the commission of crimes against humanity”, she continues. These countries have Iranian victims residing on their territory, and officials of the Iranian regime have visited at least temporarily, such as for medical reasons. Carrying out structural investigations would make it easier to act fast and issue arrest warrants if a suspected perpetrator visits, Nia explains.
There was also a universal jurisdiction case in Sweden against former Iranian prison official Hamid Nouri, in connection with the mass executions of regime opponents in 1988. He was arrested in Sweden in late 2019, tried and sentenced to life imprisonment for war crimes. However, he was freed in June 2024 in a controversial prisoner swap for two Swedish hostages held in Iran.
Hopes on the UN FFM and a dream transition
Payot of Impact Iran says that while there is little so far in terms of concrete justice, “we feel that the first important step is to properly document and investigate the most serious violations of human rights and the international crimes that are being committed”. “This is why Impact Iran worked a lot towards the establishment of the UN Fact-Finding Mission on the Islamic Republic of Iran, so that we have UN investigators able to gather information, analyse, preserve the evidence, speak with witnesses and survivors, and can pave the way for justice processes,” he continues.
Some human rights defenders are also calling for transitional justice in Iran, when the time is right. “In terms of transitional justice, there are several groups working on what that will look like,” says Nia, “including thinking about how criminal trials would proceed inside Iran of those most responsible; thinking about what the international community’s role will be in monitoring or being involved in any of these judicial processes. So that work is ongoing, and it can only be made possible if there is a transition in place.”
If a transition does not happen, she says, there are many pieces of the work that would continue, including accountability for the January massacre and also tracing the assets of Islamic Republic of Iran officials outside of Iran, and seeing if some of that can be frozen, seized or repurposed for rehabilitation of victims.
Amiry-Moghaddam agrees that there first needs to be a transition, a change of regime. As well as scrapping the death penalty and ensuring independent justice within Iran, he says “the grave violations of human rights throughout the last 47 years have been so massive and so widespread” that other forms of justice and accountability will be needed.
“We would need a truth commission, we would need to hear from all individuals and groups what they have been through,” he told Justice Info. “We are not just talking about mass executions and serious crimes you normally think of, but there has been systematic discrimination against individuals and groups based on their gender, faith and ethnicity. And probably these are groups whose voice has never been heard.”
