The law that devoured itself

*This article was originally published in French

Excerpt

On January 9, 2026, on a sidewalk in Karaj, Iran, a seventeen-year-old boy was shot in the lower back. He was taken to the hospital. There, according to his father, a refugee in Germany—where, like him, thousands of Iranians have fled the Islamic Republic to rebuild their lives in countries that have made respect for international law, or at least their interpretation of it, a religion—Sam Afshari was finished off with a bullet to the head by Iranian security forces while he lay on the operating table. His crime: going out into the street.

The Iranian government did not deny the facts. It confirmed that its forces had killed protesters that week. What it disputed was the figure: officially 3,117, while international investigators speak of 30,000 to 40,000 deaths. Amnesty International described January 2026 as the deadliest documented crackdown in decades. Human Rights Watch described bodies arriving in refrigerated trucks at the Kahrizak morgue. Piled in bags, some with bullets in their heads—the executions of the wounded. Women returned to their families with organs removed to erase evidence of rape. The regime called the rioters’ dead “terrorists.” It labeled the protests an Israeli-American plot.

Simone Rodan-Benzaquen is Senior Envoy for Europe at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), based in Paris.