The United Nations warns that an Iranian-Swedish national faces imminent execution in Iran.
Dr Ahmadreza Djalali was sentenced to death in 2017 on espionage charges that Stockholm and its supporters have called baseless, but before his arrest in Iran in April 2016, he was a visiting professor of disaster medicine at Vrije Universiteit Brussel, a Belgian research university.
“Disturbing news that Dr. Ahmadreza Djalali could be shortly executed on charges of enmity against God,” the UN human rights office says on X.
The UN human rights office says his execution could take place soon.
These claims have become especially frequent since a Swedish appeals court ruling that Hamid Noury’s life sentence for crimes committed during a 1988 purge of dissidents could jeopardise the fate of several Swedish prisoners in Iran.
Iran used detained foreigners as bargaining chips to secure the release of its citizens abroad before, and Swedish media have also speculated about the possibility of prisoner swaps. For instance, the case of EU diplomat Johan Floderus, 33, who was arrested in Iran in April 2022 and has been in detention for more than 600 days.
The UN rights office said Saturday that a “moratorium on all death sentences is urgently required” in Iran.
