Do Not Make the Absence of Testimony an Acquittal for Those Who Prevented It
This letter to the 63rd session of the Human Rights Council raises a question that goes beyond documenting violations: what happens when repression itself prevents victims from reaching the international system? It argues that the absence of information can itself be a warning sign when the authorities control the prison, the court, and the record, and calls for sustained international follow-up that does not end with a session or report, but continues until the danger to the Ahwazi individual ends and the fate, medical care, legal access, and fair-trial rights of detainees are addressed.
A Message to the Sixty-Third Session of the Human Rights Council and the United Nations Mechanisms Concerned with Iran
To the members of the Human Rights Council, the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, the Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in Iran, and the United Nations mechanisms concerned with execution, torture, arbitrary detention, and enforced disappearance:
I write to you before the convening of the sixty-third session of the Human Rights Council, not to add Ahwaz to another list of causes that are mentioned and then folded away by the agenda, but to place before you a question that concerns the very way international protection itself works:
What happens to the human being whom repression prevents from reaching you in the first place?
In Ahwaz, the problem is not that all violations are unknown.
Some arrests become known. News of some death sentences reaches the outside world. Some testimonies of torture, deprivation of medical care, and isolation from family find their way, with difficulty, to human rights institutions.
But what reaches the world is not necessarily a complete image of what is happening.
Often, it is only what managed to escape a system designed to prevent access.
When the family is afraid, the detainee is isolated, the lawyer is restricted, information is monitored, and speaking itself becomes a source of danger, the number of testimonies that have arrived can no longer be treated as a sufficient measure of the scale of the violation.
When authority has the power to prevent evidence from reaching the outside world, the absence of evidence itself becomes human rights information that must be investigated.
Otherwise, something deeply dangerous happens:
The more capable repression becomes at hiding its victim, the less visible that victim becomes to the system that was created to protect them.
In this way, the authority’s efficiency in producing silence may, unintentionally, become an advantage that works in its favor.
That is why it is not enough for the question to be:
What happened?
A second question must become part of the monitoring method itself:
What is preventing us from knowing what happened?
When a child is arrested and his family does not know where he has been taken, the danger does not begin on the day his name appears in a known prison. It begins at the moment his family’s ability to know his location is taken away from them.
When a prisoner is ill and cannot reach proper treatment or an independent doctor, we should not wait for his body to collapse before his condition becomes urgent.
When a death sentence is issued in a case surrounded by allegations of torture, confessions extracted under coercion, or denial of access to a lawyer of the accused person’s choosing, the danger does not begin at the door of the execution chamber.
A human life does not become urgent in its final hour.
United Nations mechanisms have already raised concerns regarding Masoud Jamei, Alireza Mardasi, Farshad Etemadi Far, and Reza Abdali, in cases relating to the risk of execution and allegations of torture, arbitrary detention, and violations of fair trial guarantees. Human rights reports also indicate that Hassan Mosallawi is likewise facing a death sentence in Sheiban Prison.
We should not wait for news of execution before their lives become a priority.
Their names should not become lines in an international document while the prison continues and the document ends.
The issue is wider than five names.
What the Ahwazi Arab people face in arbitrary detention, torture, death sentences, deprivation of medical treatment, and the isolation of voice and identity is unacceptable.
Not because the Ahwazi human being asks for a privilege in protection, but because human rights lose their meaning if the human being becomes less visible whenever authority becomes more capable of silencing him.
And I say, from my Ahwazi position, clearly:
The Iranian control imposed on Ahwaz since 1925 does not gain legitimacy by the mere passage of time, and force does not become right because the world has grown accustomed to a fait accompli.
Time may prolong control.
But it does not create the consent of the owners of the land.
I do not place this before the Human Rights Council in order to require it to adopt a political description before it acts.
I place it before you for a simpler and deeper human rights reason:
The authority that possesses the prison, the court, and force must not also be the only party that tells the world who the victim is, what the name of his land is, what happened to him, and what deserves to be seen.
The Ahwazi Arab people are not a secondary number inside a wider table.
They are the owners of an experience, the owners of testimony, and the owners of a right to reach the international system in their own voice.
That is why I am not asking for another statement of concern.
I am asking for a change in the way the work is done.
I ask United Nations mechanisms to treat the possibility of access to information itself as an indicator of risk; and to record, in every case, the time between arrest and knowledge of the detainee’s place of detention, the possibility of contact with family, the access of an independent lawyer, the detainee’s health condition, and what remains unknown about the circumstances of detention.
I ask for the creation of a safe and regular channel to receive and preserve testimonies related to Ahwaz, allowing families, victims, and witnesses to transmit information without turning the act of sending the truth into a new source of danger for them.
I ask, where the evidence allows, that data related to Ahwaz be disaggregated by place, language, identity, and type of violation, so that specific patterns do not disappear inside broad general numbers.
And I ask that every documented case become a path of follow-up, not a name that appears once and then disappears.
Where is the detainee now?
Has he reached a lawyer?
Has he received treatment?
Is the sentence still in place?
Has his place of detention changed?
Have the authorities responded to the questions addressed to them?
And what remains unknown?
But more important than all of this:
Do not make follow-up dependent on the occasion.
Human rights do not work by seasons.
The human being does not become less imprisoned because the session has ended.
He does not become less exposed to execution because the statement has been published.
And the family does not recover its son because his name has entered a report.
Do not close the file when its place on the agenda ends; close it when the danger to the human being ends.
Follow-up must continue until the fate of the disappeared is known, the sick reaches treatment, the detainee obtains a lawyer and a fair trial, any death sentence accompanied by grave violations of fair trial guarantees is halted, and every Ahwazi detainee whose detention is proven arbitrary is released.
In the file of arbitrary detention in particular, the goal should not be to reach the last report.
The goal must be for protection to continue until the release of the last Ahwazi detainee whose detention has been proven arbitrary.
A human rights file that closes with the end of an occasion while its owner remains behind bars has not closed.
Only the world’s attention to that person has been closed.
I also ask that the flow of information not move in one direction only.
The family that risked sending testimony should know, within the limits of protection and confidentiality, that its voice has arrived, that the case has been examined, and that follow-up exists.
We cannot ask a human being to risk sending the truth to the international system and then leave him unable to know whether that truth reached anywhere at all.
This is not a call to add more paper to the human rights system.
It is a call to change the unit of measurement.
In an open environment, a violation may leave a trace that the world can pursue.
But in a closed environment, the erasure of the trace itself may be part of the violation.
If institutions see only those who managed to reach them, then the people most exposed to repression may become, because of the intensity of that repression itself, the least present before them.
Here, the question I place before the sixty-third session becomes larger than Ahwaz alone:
Were human rights tools designed only to see the human being who managed to reach them, or also to reach the human being whom the entire machinery of repression works to prevent from reaching them?
If repression can decide whom international institutions will see and whom they will not see, then it retains a power it must never possess:
The power to choose its visible victims.
Do not grant it this power.
Do not make the absence of testimony an acquittal for those who prevented it.
And do not make the end of the session the end of the human being in institutional memory.
Keep the file open until the danger ends, not until the time ends.
Because the success of human rights is not measured by the number of names that enter reports.
It is measured by the number of human beings beside whom the world remained long enough for their fate to change.
— Hamid Shayea Al-Ahwazi —
3.9.2026