May 12, 2023
“Chaab was a hostage from the moment he was abducted and taken to Iran against his will,” said Hadi Ghaemi, executive director of the New York-based Center for Human Rights in Iran (CHRI).
“This is nothing less than blatant attempts at extortion by the Islamic Republic and the international community should address this in a coordinated and forceful manner,” he said.
The Iranian government refused to allow the Swedish government to visit Chaab or be present at his trial, where Chaab was denied a lawyer of his choice.
Chaab, an ethnic Arab, was accused of being the founder and former leader of a separatist group, the Arab Struggle Movement for the Liberation of Ahvaz (ASMLA), as well as carrying out terrorist operations in Khuzestan Province.
He was sentenced to death for “corruption on earth,” a capital offense that Iranian courts often use against dissidents who criticize state policies.
Khuzestan province, where Chaab was born, holds approximately 80 percent of Iran’s onshore oil reserves yet remains economically underdeveloped due to the Iranian government’s discrimination against the province’s large ethnic Arab minority.
Ethnic Arabs, Kurds, and Baluchis have also been historically executed in higher numbers than Persians in Iran.
The confirmation of Chaab’s death sentence occurred against the backdrop of a Swedish court’s life sentence against Hamid Noury, a former Iranian official, for his involvement in the mass executions of prisoners in Iran in 1988.
Another Swedish citizen, medical scientist Ahmadreza Djalali, has been imprisoned in Iran with a death sentence hanging over his head since 2017. He was first arrested in April 2016 and has been held in Tehran’s Evin Prison since.
Chaab is one of three Iranian dissidents who have been abducted by Iranian agents and brought back to Iran since 2019.
France-based dissident Ruhollah Zam was earlier lured to Iraq in 2019, abducted and then executed in Iran in December 2020.
Iranian-born German citizen and political dissident, Jamshid Sharmahd, who is also a US resident, was kidnaped by agents of the Islamic Republic in 2020 while he was passing through Dubai, according to his family.
The Islamic Republic accused him of being the leader of Tondar, the militant wing of the opposition group known as the Kingdom Assembly of Iran and sentenced him to death in February. He remains in prison awaiting execution.
“This was yet another kidnaping, show trial and death sentence, aimed at forcing another country, in this case Sweden, to do what the Iranian government wants,” said Ghaemi.