The Blinding of Protesters and Bystanders in Iran

Summary

This report, “The Blinding of Protestors and Bystanders in Iran: An Open Source Investigation for the Iranian Archive Coalition,” is one in a series analyzing human rights violations and international crimes committed by the Islamic Republic of Iran (Iran or IRI or Islamic Republic) in its brutal crackdown on Woman, Life, Freedom protesters. Each investigation is largely based on open source information that has been preserved as part of the Iranian Archive — a repository of digital content that has been forensically preserved for use in future accountability efforts. Each report in this series focuses on a different set of violations, and together they make visible some of the harms suffered by Iranian protesters in their demands for freedom and respect for their human rights. 

In early fall 2023, the Investigations Lab at UC Berkeley’s Human Rights Center was invited to join a coalition of organizations that had recently begun investigating alleged crimes and human rights violations perpetrated by the Islamic Republic of Iran against protestors. Our team was tasked with using data from the Iranian Archive to identify, evaluate, and verify the alleged blinding of people who participated in or were bystanders to protests that had been triggered by the killing of a young woman from Iran’s persecuted ethnic Kurdish minority, Mahsa Jina Amini, for her alleged “improper” wearing of hijab in September 2022. This report summarizes our findings from that investigation.