Having spent a lifetime defending human rights and freedom across continents, I have learned one bitter truth: when a regime turns its guns on its own people for demanding liberty and the world looks away, it gives the killers permission to strike again. Nowhere is this truth written in blood more clearly than in Iran.

On November 15, Washington, D.C. will host the first-ever Free Iran Convention, a gathering of Iranian American activists, scholars, and policymakers. Its purpose is clear: to give voice to the victims and survivors of a regime that has turned mass killing into state policy — and to demand that the free world finally stop looking away.

For more than four decades, the Iranian regime has ruled through terror. Since 2018 alone, three nationwide uprisings have shaken its foundations, each demanding democracy and an end to clerical rule. Each time, the response has been bloodshed.

The 2022 uprising saw security forces open fire on protesters across dozens of cities, killing some 750 people and arresting thousands. In the months that followed, the judiciary accelerated its already world-leading pace of executions — more than 850 in 2023, nearly 1,000 in 2024, and over 1,300 in 2025, making it the bloodiest year in decades.

Among the victims were activists and protesters accused of “enmity against God.” Many were linked to Iran’s organized democratic opposition, particularly the People’s Mojahedin Organization of Iran (PMOI/MEK) — the principal member of the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI). At least 17 political prisoners associated with the PMOI are currently on death row, facing imminent execution, and two others were hanged in July despite global appeals for clemency.

This escalating wave of state killings revives the darkest chapter in Iran’s modern history: the 1988 massacre of 30,000 political prisoners. That crime, described by the late UN Special Rapporteur Javaid Rehman as one that may amount to genocide, remains unpunished to this day.

In the summer of that year, acting on a fatwa by the founder of the regime, Ruhollah Khomeini, “death commissions” interrogated prisoners across Iran, executing anyone who refused to renounce the MEK. In just three months, an estimated 30,000 were killed, their bodies buried in secret mass graves.

Western governments were warned at the time but did nothing. The international community then compounded its failure by declining to investigate afterward. That silence became complicity — and it emboldened Tehran to make mass execution part of its routine governance.

Only one perpetrator, former prison official Hamid Noury, has ever faced justice, tried and convicted in Sweden under universal jurisdiction. Even that symbolic victory was undone when Stockholm traded him for a Swedish national taken hostage by Tehran. Yet the case remains a vital precedent, showing that accountability is possible when political will exists.

Today, that will is necessary more than ever before. The Iranian regime is not only executing dissidents at home but also threatening families abroad and targeting activists in exile. The machinery of repression that powered the 1988 massacre is operating again — updated, digitized, and globalized. And just like before, Tehran is betting that the world will avert its gaze.

That is why the Free Iran Convention matters. It will bring together survivors, families of victims, and international dignitaries to confront this impunity head-on. Participants will explore how the international community can wield its existing tools — sanctions, diplomatic isolation, and international arrest warrants — to hold the regime accountable for crimes against humanity and prevent a new wave of killings.

They will also draw attention to the growing movement inside Iran. Despite mass arrests and executions, Resistance Units linked to the MEK continue to organize and inspire protests nationwide. Their persistence reflects a fundamental truth: the Iranian people have not given up, even as the world too often has.

The time for hesitation is over. With over 3,000 executions and countless murders in custody over the past three years alone, Iran’s killing machine has reached levels unseen since the 1980s. Each day of silence condemns more innocents to death.

The choice facing Western governments could not be clearer: stand with the Iranian people or inadvertently you would be on the wrong side of history once again. The international community must recognize the NCRI and Iran’s organized resistance as legitimate representatives of the Iranian people, refer the 1988 massacre to the UN Security Council, and pursue prosecution of those responsible — up to the highest levels of power.

The families of Iran’s victims have waited nearly four decades for justice. They should not have to wait any longer.

Bruce McColm is the President of the Institute for Democratic Strategies and was the Executive Director of the Freedom House.