Cartoon by Berend Vonk

EU set to approve new sanctions against Iran after protesters executed

The National: EU foreign ministers are set to approve additional sanctions against Iran on Monday, after the execution last week of three men convicted of killing security forces members during protests last year.

This will be the eighth time since October that Brussels will have imposed sanctions against Iranian individuals and entities involved in the repression of the protesters.

Sanctions include an asset freeze and a travel ban to the EU.

“We will approve a new package of sanctions against Iran for human rights abuses,” the EU's top diplomat Josep Borrell told reporters in Brussels as he arrived at the meeting of foreign ministers.

“Remember that three people have been executed.”

On Friday, Majid Kazemi, Saleh Mirhashemi and Saeed Yaghoubi were hanged in the central city of Isfahan.

They had been sentenced to death in January after being found guilty of “moharebeh” – waging “war against God” – for killing two members of the Basij paramilitary force and a police officer on November 16, according to the Iranian judiciary.

Their deaths brought to seven the number of Iranians executed in connection with the nationwide protests that followed the death in custody of 22-year-old Iranian Kurd Mahsa Amini on September 16.

She had been detained by the morality police in Tehran three days earlier for wearing her hijab “improperly”.

German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock said more members of Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps will be added to the sanction lists.

“We won't accept this”, Ms Baerbock said, referring to human rights violations by Iran.

During the protests, which Tehran described as foreign-instigated “riots”, thousands of Iranians were arrested and hundreds of people killed, including dozens of security personnel.

The country hanged 75 per cent more people in 2022 than the previous year, the Norway-based group Iran Human Rights and Paris-based Together Against the Death Penalty said in a joint report in April.

At least 582 people were executed in Iran last year, the highest number of executions in the country since 2015 and well above the 333 recorded in 2021, the two groups said.

But the pace of executions this year has been even higher so far, IHR now counting at least 260 executions since the start of the year.