Moreover, religious charges are commonly deployed against regime opponents. For instance, the State Department reported that “According to numerous international human rights NGOs and media reporting, the government convicted and executed dissidents, political reformers, and peaceful protesters on charges of ‘enmity against God’ and spreading anti-Islamic propaganda.” A panel of United Nations experts denounced Tehran’s practices: “The international community cannot remain silent while Iranian authorities use overbroad and vague national security and espionage charges to silence religious minorities or people with dissenting opinions, remove them from their homes and effectively force them into internal displacement.” In 2022 State explained that “the government arrested 140 individuals, imprisoned 39, issued travel bans against 51, summoned 102, raided the homes of 94, and brought 11 to trial for their religious beliefs.”
No one is exempt from abuse. Jews, Gonabadi Sufis, and Sunnis suffer. Perhaps most victimized are Baha’is, with more than 1,000 currently imprisoned for their faith. Last year USCIRF reported that Tehran “escalated its repression of Baha’is, restricting access to religious sites, issuing legal rulings supporting confiscation of Baha’i properties, denying Baha’is entrance to universities, and conducting systematic arrests.”
Finally, reported State, “Officials continued to disproportionately arrest, detain, harass, and surveil Christians, particularly evangelicals and other converts from Islam, according to Christian NGOs. Authorities also forcibly disappeared Christian converts, whom it accused of ‘Zionism’ and proselytizing.”
Indeed, the groups Open Doors, Middle East Concern, and Christian Solidarity Worldwide recently issued a joint report, “Faceless Victims: Rights Violations Against Christians in Iran,” on Tehran’s campaign against Christians. It makes for grim reading. (It was more difficult listening to two Iranian converts discuss their personal experiences at a recent conference on religious persecution which I attended, but their names cannot be revealed out of concern for family members left behind.)
The regime largely tolerates expatriates and “historic” Christians, most notably Armenians, and Assyrians. However, while not so often imprisoned, these groups are closely monitored by the fearful Islamic regime. “Faceless Victims” details how “intelligence officers belonging to the Law Enforcement Command of the Islamic Republic of Iran, or FARA JA, were using spyware to monitor members of minority communities, including Christians. The spyware is capable of extracting data, including photographs, screenshots of conversations, and recordings of video calls, from applications such as WhatsApp and Telegram, and most victims live in minority areas, including West Azerbaijan Province, home to many Armenian and Assyrian Christians.”
Usually suffering far more are converts, who directly challenge Islam’s dominance. They are “numerically the largest Christian community in Iran, but they are not recognized by the state and are frequently targeted by the authorities and, in some cases, by their extended families and society.” Most dramatic is the ban on converts from established churches. The controls are based on language: