Human Lives Human Rights: In recent days, a court in the United Kingdom conducted the investigation of November 2019 petrol price events in Iran. The aim of this trial was to investigate the number of victims of this incident through the people who have been introduced by the court as eyewitnesses of the incident.
In this article, we will try to review the claims of this court.
In this five-day trial, a person named Ammar Maleki, a professor at Tilburg University in the Netherlands claimed that as per Iran’s National Organization for Civil Registration the mortality rate in autumn 2019 compared to previous years was increased by 8,000 people. He said that this figure can only be associated with the November 2019 incident. However, according to statistics of Amnesty International, the number of victims of November 2019 incident is only 304 people, not 8000 people.
Meanwhile, increase in the number of deaths in November 2019, could probably be associated with the increase in air pollution, which intensified in December same year. Also, this increase could be because of the corona outbreak because the people who were dying had the similar symptoms and in the beginning of the outbreak in the December same year, Covid spread enormously in Iran.
Another thing that adds to the ambiguities of this trial is anonymity, the identity and even the voice of the people who were named as witnesses in this trial was kept hidden. The court stated security as the reason for the secrecy of their identities. However, what has been seen in the trials of crimes against humanity like the Nuremberg Trials, in Tokyo and even in Saddam Hussein’s criminal court, was that in order to maintain the security of the witness, he used to enter the court with a covered face and then give the testament.
It is noteworthy that the statements of the witnesses, narrated by a third person without mentioning their names or even their voices, was a new circumstance that happened in this court. From every point of view, when the narrations of this court are reviewed, new points come up that indicate that the above trial process lacks authenticity.
