This morning, Wednesday, April 16, 2025, Heydatollah Farzadi, the head of Evin Prison, announced that five political prisoners sentenced to death — Vahid Bani Amerian, Seyed Mohammad Taghavi, Babak Alipour, Pouya Ghobadi, and Shahrokh Daneshvarkar — are to be transferred from Ward 4 of Evin Prison to Qezel-Hesar Prison by the end of the day, by order of Judge Iman Afshari.In response to the prisoners’ opposition to the transfer, he has threatened to move them by force with the intervention of the prison guards.
Following Farzadi’s order, since this morning, the halls of Ward 4 of Evin have been locked down, and prisoners have been isolated so that no one can protest.
These prisoners were sentenced to death in December 2024 by Branch 26 of the Tehran Revolutionary Court, presided over by Iman Afshari, on charges of “membership in the People’s Mojahedin Organization of Iran (PMOI/MEK).”
Qezel-Hesar Prison is one of the main execution sites in Iran, where death sentences are routinely carried out.
Previously, on January 26, 2025 and April 3, 2025, three other political prisoners — Behrouz Ehsani Eslamloo, Mehdi Hassani, and Seyed Abolhassan Montazer — who were also sentenced to death on similar charges, were suddenly transferred from Evin to Qezel-Hesar.
On another front, four Baloch political prisoners whose death sentences have been finalized are at imminent risk of execution. On April 9, 2025, the request for retrial by Abdulrahim Qanbarzehi Gorgij, a political prisoner sentenced to death, was rejected. Prior to that, the Supreme Court of the regime upheld the death sentences of his three co-defendants — Eido Shahbakhsh, Abdolghani Shahbakhsh, and Soleiman Shahbakhsh — and their retrial requests were also rejected. Notably, Soleiman was only 12 years old at the time of the alleged crime.
We urgently call on the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, the UN Special Rapporteur, and the United Nations Independent Fact-Finding Mission, as well as the EU Human Rights Commissioner, to take immediate action to save the lives of political prisoners sentenced to death. This is an extremely urgent and critical appeal.
