Mersedeh Shahinkar was 38 at the time she was attacked. Photograph: Filip Singer/EPA

Claim filed in Argentina alleges crimes against humanity were carried out on Women, Life, Freedom protesters

Patrick Wintour
Diplomatic editor

The Guardian

A group of victims of the Iranian government crackdown during the Women, Life, Freedom protests in 2022 have filed the first criminal complaint against 40 named Iranian officials alleging crimes against humanity, including targeted blinding and murder.

The request for a criminal investigation to be launched has been filed in Argentina by a group of Iranians with the help of the non-profit Iran Human Rights Documentation Center. The Argentinian legal system is especially open to accommodating universal jurisdiction claims.

The filing claims the response from Iran’s security forces to the protests in Iran included “shooting live ammunition, paintball guns, metal pellets not intended to be shot at close range, and other projectiles at protesters. They also carried out mass arrests, arbitrary detentions, custodial torture, and ultimately even executions of protesters that continue to the present day.”

Specific officers across the range of Iran’s security services have been named in the filing, but their names are being kept confidential.

One of those making the claim, UK-based Mahsa Piraei, told the Guardian “what is being pursued here is not revenge in a personal sense, but accountability and truth”. Her mother, Minoo Majidi, 62, was shot dead in September 2022. Autopsy reports showed more than 167 metal pellets had been fired into her back at point-blank range. She had been on a street protest over the death of Mahsa Amini, a young Kurdish woman who was killed in a Tehran police station after being arrested for not complying with Iran’s rules around the hijab.

Piraei, one of Majidi’s three children, lived in the UK at the time of her mother’s brutal death, but returned to Iran at great risk to visit her grave. Her sister Roya posted a photograph of herself by her mother’s grave with her hair shaved on her private social media account. A friend published the photograph which went viral, forcing Roya to seek exile in Turkey.

Piraei said: “Through legal filings and documentation the aim is to preserve evidence, name crimes and prevent erasure.” She added her mother’s death was “not an isolated incident but part of a systematic practice. Even if protesters were not individually targeted for death, the actions of the security services show a reckless and knowing disregard for human life. Firing such weapons into crowds made serious injury or death foreseeable and effectively intentional.”

She added: “Over time my grief did not disappear, but it became clearer to me that staying silent would be another form of loss. I no longer measure myself by whether I can ‘fix’ what happened because I cannot. Instead I measure myself by whether I refuse to let my mother’s life and death be erased.”

The other two litigants who can be identified are Kowsar Eftekhari and Mersedeh Shahinkar, both victims of blinding at close range by paintball guns.

Eftekhari, a 23-year-old university student, was shot in the right eye in October 2022. She protested in the streets for weeks, witnessing fellow protesters being shot with live ammunition and being beaten herself with electronic batons by security officers.

During a protest on 12 October, Eftekhari was at a demonstration near Tehran University when a plainclothes officer shot her with seven or eight paintballs at the range of a metre. He then allegedly shot her in the eye when she did not respond to his demand to disperse. A video of the attack including blood pouring from her right eye went viral, and she was eventually given asylum in Germany.

Shahinkar, 38 at the time she was attacked on 18 October, only realised what had happened when she felt something warm on her face. Protesters warned her not to get into an ambulance since she might be taken to a police station. When Shahinkar finally arrived at a medical clinic, a staff member told her to leave because they would not treat protesters. But a doctor examined her and sent her to a hospital, where Shahinkar pretended a rock accidentally injured her eye so that she would not be denied treatment. She posted her injuries on her Instagram page, and in January 2023 plainclothes officers approached her, leading her to flee Iran. She collected the 2023 Sakharov prize, which honours individuals or groups who defend human rights and basic freedoms, as a representative of the Women, Life, Freedom movement.

The group seeking the criminal investigation say the filing is not viewed just as a legal complaint with no hope of a practical outcome. Universal jurisdiction allows complaints to be investigated in a third country even if the offence did not occur in that country and the offender is not there. Argentina has some of the most liberal rules on universal jurisdiction claims in the world.

In 2014 alone the principle of universal jurisdiction led to 27 convictions, the opening of least 36 cases, covering crimes committed in 32 countries. Cases are currently being prosecuted in 16 different countries.

As the request is solely for a criminal investigation, and this is not a civil lawsuit, there is no demand by the complainants for money damages. The complaint would not be the first case against Iranian officials brought in Argentina. In June 2025, an Argentinian judge ordered that in absentia trials begin against seven Iranian suspects, along with three Lebanese individuals, for the 1994 bombing of a Jewish community centre in Buenos Aires in which 85 people were killed and hundreds wounded.