OPINION: Tehran hanged Saleh Mohammadi five weeks after his arrest, and Ottawa must name the judges

Qom, March 19

A 19-year-old wrestler

The Islamic Republic hanged Saleh Mohammadi in public, in Qom, on March 19, about five weeks after his arrest, according to Human Rights Watch.

He was 19. He was a wrestling champion.

Five weeks. Thirty-five days. The time a cast stays on a broken wrist.

Five weeks between the arrest and the rope.

Eighty-four days

Amir Hossein Hatami was 18. He was executed on April 2, 84 days after his arrest, the organization reports.

Twelve weeks. For him, that already counted as long.

Mohammad Amin Biglari was 19. Executed on April 6.

From arrest to rope, HRW counts from five weeks to 8 months. Most cases close in under six.

I will count in weeks in this piece. It is the unit Tehran chose.

There, a life is counted in weeks of waiting.

The principal threat

New York, Saturday

On Saturday, from the UN podium, Anita Anand stated Canada’s position without hedging. Iran, the foreign minister said, is “the principal threat” to peace and security in its region, and it must never acquire a nuclear weapon.

She added that Canada is deploying every available tool, including the targeted sanctions announced that week.

And she promised that Canada would again lead the General Assembly resolution on human rights in Iran.

A region, a people

The same speech spoke of Ukrainian children and the Black Sea. Here, only Iran matters.

The principal threat. To whom, first?

The minister was speaking of the region. She named the neighbours. She named the strait. She named the bomb. All of that is true.

But the Islamic Republic’s first threat weighs on those who live under it.

The minister has a name for her doctrine, the Globe and Mail reports: “values-based realism.” I take her at her word. In Iran, this year, values have faces. The faces of the hanged.

A regional threat begins in a prison yard.

Five and five

September 23

Three days before her speech, on September 23, the minister announced the new round: 5 individuals and 5 entities sanctioned under the Special Economic Measures (Iran) Regulations.

The targets: senior security and government officials, and state entities, involved in digital repression and other grave human rights violations.

Canada is using “every tool at its disposal,” the minister said.

Digital repression means shutdowns and wiretaps. In January, during the protests, the regime cut the internet for 21 days, according to Human Rights Watch. On February 28, traffic plunged again, by 98%.

An entire country in front of a screen that no longer loads.

Twenty-four rounds

With this announcement, Ottawa counts 24 rounds of sanctions against Iran since October 2022. 237 individuals. 265 entities.

A listed person can no longer enter Canada, the Global Affairs sanctions page specifies.

As early as September 6, in a statement co-signed with Finance Minister François-Philippe Champagne, the minister recalled that Canada has sanctioned 492 Iranian individuals and entities since 2010.

This is a real step. I say so up front, because what follows will be demanding.

Surveillance, censorship, arbitrary detention: Ottawa aimed at the right hands. I am pointing it to another pair.

Ottawa targets those who listen. It must target those who sign.

Fifty-nine men

The September 10 report

On September 10, Human Rights Watch and the Abdorrahman Boroumand Center for Human Rights in Iran published their count.

Between March 18 and the end of August, Iranian authorities executed at least 59 men on political grounds, after grossly unfair trials.

Do the math. More than two a week, for nearly twenty-four weeks.

At least 29 had been arrested during the protests of December 2025 and January 2026. At least three during the Woman, Life, Freedom movement of 2022. Several were 18 or 19.

Those protests had broken out on December 28, 2025, after the currency collapsed, JURIST recalls. A collapsing currency means prices that change between morning and evening.

In 16 of the 29 protest-related cases, no homicide charge. Broken windows. Thrown stones. Fires set.

The judges who sign

I stand with the Iranian protesters sentenced to death. Against the courts of the Islamic Republic that send them to the gallows. And I ask Ottawa to name, on its next list, the judges who sign.

Because in five and a half months, 59 political executions were documented, and dozens of other condemned people remain at risk, according to HRW.

Fifty-nine executions, and each one bears a signature.

The 2025 espionage law

A shortened procedure

On the other side, there is a text, and it has a date.

Iran’s 2025 espionage law broadened punishable conduct and shortened procedural deadlines, Roya Boroumand explains. At least 8 protesters were convicted under that law.

The typical charge: “operational action on behalf of hostile states.” Or “waging war against God.” Or “corruption on earth.”

A young man throws a stone. The court sees a foreign agent.

Lawyers chosen by the judge

HRW describes defendants denied a lawyer of their choosing. There are lawyers approved by the judiciary, and only them. There are case files closed to the defence. There are mass trials.

The organization also documents beatings, electric shocks, mock executions, threats of sexual violence, and televised confessions made without a lawyer.

The courts dismissed torture allegations without investigating, the organization adds. A filmed confession becomes evidence for the judge, and one more humiliation for the family.

Judges who hand down these sentences on the strength of such confessions could bear responsibility for serious international crimes, HRW believes.

That means them. Not an abstract system. Magistrates, in courtrooms, who sign.

The law sets the frame. The judge sets the date.

Twenty weeks

Ottawa’s pace

Back to the unit. Weeks.

On February 13, Ottawa listed seven individuals for transnational repression. On March 25, five individuals and four entities tied to arms procurement for the Revolutionary Guards. On August 13, five individuals for obstructing navigation in the Strait of Hormuz. On September 22, the digital repression round.

That is what the Global Affairs sanctions page shows. The same page recalls that on September 30, 2025, Ottawa amended its regulations to apply the snapback of UN sanctions against Iran.

So Canada is not idle. It is methodical. The method has a pace.

Four rounds in 2026. Each useful. None at the pace of the gallows.

Five against twenty

It took Ottawa twenty weeks between the March round and the August one.

It took Tehran five weeks between Saleh Mohammadi’s arrest and his hanging.

I do not blame Ottawa for being slower than a Revolutionary Court. A serious list requires evidence, and evidence takes time.

And yet the evidence already exists. It was published on September 10, with the names of the condemned and the dates.

Tehran counts in weeks. Ottawa counts in seasons.

2,113 in one year

What twenty-four rounds did not prevent

Now I must write against my own demand.

The Boroumand Center documented 2,113 executions in Iran in 2025, the highest number since the late 1980s, according to RFE/RL. The organization Iran Human Rights counted 549 for 2026 as of September.

Five hundred forty-nine in a little over eight months. More than two a day.

Twenty-four Canadian rounds. And the gallows did not slow down.

Ottawa has done it before

Another fact that troubles my letter: on December 12, 2025, Ottawa listed four senior officials of the Revolutionary Guards and the prison system for grave violations of the rights of protesters and prisoners.

So Canada is not discovering the subject. It has already targeted jailers.

And a judge in Qom probably has neither a bank account nor a cottage in Canada. Listing him may cost him nothing tangible.

That is true. And yet a list that targets the jailers must also target the hand that signs.

Naming the jailers is not enough. The signature is missing.

The cranes of Isfahan

Alikhani Square, July 28

Let us slow down.

On July 28, in Isfahan, in Alikhani Square, Abolfazl Sepahi and Amir Hossein Safari were hanged in public, according to HRW.

Five public executions in five months, with cranes mounted on trucks, JURIST reports.

Five times, the gallows went up to be seen.

A crane. A public square. Two young men.

On a truck crane, there is an engine running while people wait. Then silence.

Those no one warned

Mehrab Abdollahzadeh. Ashkan Maleki. Mehrdad Mohammadinia. Executed without their families or their lawyers being informed, according to HRW.

A mother learns there will be no final visit. She learns the rest afterward.

Sasan Azadvar Jonaqani, 21, a karate champion, sentenced and executed in under four months.

Fewer than seventeen weeks.

On August 1, around 4 a.m., at Shahrud prison, Arvin Kheirkhahan, 19, arrested during the January protests, was executed, according to RFE/RL. He had left his family one last request: that they not let him be forgotten.

I add nothing to that request.

In Isfahan, the gallows had wheels.

The judges have names

What HRW asks

The September 10 report does not stop at grief. It addresses states.

It asks them for diplomatic pressure to obtain a moratorium. Investigations under universal jurisdiction against Iranian judicial officials. The gathering of evidence for future trials. Structural investigations that link each individual case to the system that produced it.

It identifies the judges who hand down death sentences on the strength of coerced confessions as possibly responsible for serious international crimes.

What Ottawa can do

Canada can list. Canada can refuse entry. Canada can write: since 2003, it has led the General Assembly resolution on human rights in Iran.

How many of these judges are already on a Western list?

Three levers. None requires an army.

And a fourth, quieter one. From the same podium, the minister recalled that Canada is seeking a seat on the Human Rights Council for 2028 to 2030. A candidacy is also judged by what it dares to list.

List the judges the investigations identify. Write the 2025 law into the text of the resolution. Add the names to the case file for future trials.

Every signature under a death sentence deserves a line on a list.

One more symbol

The realist’s argument

Here is the strongest objection, and I give it in full.

Listing an Iranian judge is a symbol. He will never travel to Toronto. And the real threat, the realist would say, remains the bomb and the strait: Ottawa would do better to focus its lists on the Revolutionary Guards and their money.

Tehran, for its part, would reply that these sanctions violate its sovereignty. It is used to saying so.

The realist is right on one point: the bomb and the strait matter. He is wrong to separate the files.

The regime links the two itself

And yet it is the regime that made the link. It hangs protesters in the name of “operational action on behalf of hostile states.” Foreign war has become an article of law against its own young people.

Even from inside, the criticism exists. From Evin prison, former deputy interior minister Mostafa Tajzadeh wrote on August 3 that executions heal none of Iran’s wounds, according to RFE/RL.

And the symbol has a history. In 1988, Iranian authorities executed between 2,800 and 5,000 political prisoners outside any judicial framework, with no independent investigation, JURIST recalls.

Without an investigation, memory stayed silent. The gallows came back.

Today’s name is tomorrow’s evidence.

Hormuz does not erase Qom

August 13

Ottawa does not have to choose between the region and the prison. It has already done both.

On August 13, Canada listed five individuals for obstructing navigation in the Strait of Hormuz. On September 23, it targeted digital repression.

On September 6, Ottawa also backed efforts led by the United States, France and the United Kingdom to reopen the strait.

The minister is right about the region. I do not fault her word.

What is coming

I ask her not to trade it away.

Washington is considering sanctions relief for Iran in its on-and-off talks, Chatham House notes.

The day relief comes up, someone will suggest starting with whatever seems least strategic. Human rights lists look like that…

They are not. They carry the names of those who signed.

I can see that bargain coming. Names that bring in no barrel would be the first sacrificed, because they weigh nothing on an oil balance sheet.

A deal on the bomb must buy nothing for the gallows.

By November 2

Five weeks for Ottawa

I propose Tehran’s unit to Ottawa. Five weeks. By November 2.

It is short. It is the deadline Iran’s judiciary gave itself for Saleh Mohammadi. A democracy can move just as fast to list a name.

Let Canada name, in its next round, the judges behind the sentences documented by HRW and the Boroumand Center.

Let Canada shut the door on them, as on anyone listed.

Let Canada write the 2025 espionage law into the resolution it leads at the General Assembly.

It should add these names to the case file for future trials, as HRW asks.

And it should say, before any talks, that sanctions for human rights violations will not be negotiated.

Nothing impossible

None of these demands costs a dollar. None requires a ship.

They require a decision. And a date.

Ottawa already has the files. HRW published them on September 10.

These are not an activist’s demands. They come from a public report that any civil servant can open this morning.

Published evidence awaits a Canadian signature.

Names against names

The ones we must say

Saleh Mohammadi, 19. Amir Hossein Hatami, 18. Mohammad Amin Biglari, 19. Sasan Azadvar Jonaqani, 21. Arvin Kheirkhahan, 19.

The last one asked not to be forgotten. Naming is the only answer left to us.

Their names are public. The names of the judges who sentenced them must be public too, on a Canadian list.

I admit it: for a long time I read these execution figures the way you read another country’s weather. Fifty-nine. Five hundred forty-nine. I turned the page.

The next list

Will these judges’ names be on the Canadian list by November 2?

An email to an MP takes less than five minutes.

In Qom, five weeks were enough.

Five weeks for the rope, five weeks to name the judges.

Sources:

Primary Sources:

• Global Affairs Canada — Anita Anand’s address to the UN, Iran as the principal threat, September 26, 2026
• Global Affairs Canada — 24th round of sanctions against Iran, September 23, 2026
• Human Rights Watch and the Boroumand Center — executions of protesters in Iran, September 10, 2026

Secondary Sources:

• The Globe and Mail — Anand’s speech at the UN, September 26, 2026
• JURIST — the HRW report and the 1988 precedent, September 12, 2026
• RFE/RL — Iran steps up executions to deter dissent, September 10, 2026