Investigating Violence Against Woman, Life, Freedom Protesters in Iran

On September 16, 2022, Mahsa “Jina” Amini, a 22-year-old woman from Iran’s historically marginalized Kurdish ethnic minority, died in police custody in Tehran after being in a coma for three days. She had been detained for allegedly donning an “improper hijab” while on a family trip, and was found to have sustained severe beating at the hands of Iranian security forces. Amini’s killing sparked nationwide protests. Young women took to the streets — burning their headscarves, dancing, and calling for an end to the regime. Wide swaths of Iranian society joined the movement, including parents, grandparents, ethnic and religious minorities, LGBTQ+ persons, and people representing all genders and socioeconomic backgrounds, supporting the demands for “Woman, Life, Freedom” and calling for an end to the four-decade rule of Iran by the Islamic Republic.

In response, we joined a coalition of organizations to contribute to the creation of the Iranian Archive, led by Mnemonic, to preserve the open source content people in Iran risked so much to share online and ensure that preservation complies with legal standards in order to maximize the value of that content for court. We have shared our findings with the Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on the Islamic Republic of Iran, and initiated a series of reports based on the data collected to pursue accountability for specific crimes.