Source: www.internationalaffairs.org.au
In the years after the 1979 Islamic Revolution, the Iranian government executed more than 200 Bahá’ís, members of the country’s largest non-Muslim religious minority. It then pivoted to a systematic policy signed by the Supreme Leader in an official memorandum in 1991 to block the progress and development of the entire Bahá’í community.
Iran’s Islamic Revolution took place 46 years ago, meaning that for 46 years, Iran’s largest religious minority, the Baha’i community, has been suppressed across all aspects of life. Baha’is make up Iran’s largest non-Muslim religious minority, yet the country’s constitution fails to recognise their existence and they have endured systematic persecution since the earliest days of the Islamic Republic.
More than 200 Baha’is were executed in the Revolution’s first years. Many of these people were targeted because they were members of elected Baha’i institutions. One of the earliest incidents came in August 1980, when the nine-member national governing council of the Baha’i community was abducted, disappearing without a trace, now presumed dead. But perhaps the most dramatic episode came in June 1983, when ten Iranian Bahá’í women in Shiraz, one aged just 17 and most in their 20s, were hanged. The only “crime” was being Baha’is and their belief in the principles of oneness, equality, and justice. Today, the women are remembered through a worldwide campaign, #OurStoryIsOne, which ties their story to Iran’s broader struggle for social justice and gender equality.
Baha’is in Iran today face arbitrary detention, baseless charges, and unjust prison sentences, as well as the denial of higher education, livelihoods and access to employment, and hate speech. More than two-thirds of the Baha’is arrested, summoned, tried or jailed in recent months have been women.
The international community plays a vital role in defending the rights of the Iranian Baha’i community. And the present moment—marked by a new engagement between Iran and the P5+1 powers—offers a critical opportunity to remember human rights amid wider foreign policy objectives. Doing so requires a broad understanding of what is happening to the Baha’is in Iran, as well as why and how, so that government and international officials can hold their Iranian counterparts accountable.
When the Bahá’í Faith emerged in 19th-century Iran, it introduced principles such as the equality of women and men, the harmony of science and religion, and the importance of education and service to society. Like many new religions throughout history, its appearance from within an established religious orthodoxy was met with suspicion and misunderstanding. Some within Iran’s religious leadership perceived the faith as a challenge to traditional authority and sought to curtail its influence. Over time, this resistance evolved into systematic efforts—particularly after the Islamic Revolution in 1979—to restrict Bahá’ís from expressing their beliefs or contributing openly to society. Yet for Bahá’ís, sharing their identity and values is an essential aspect of who they are. Ensuring their right to speak and be heard is not only a matter of religious freedom, but of basic human dignity.
After international condemnation pushed the Iranian government to halt the execution of Baha’is in 1991, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei signed a memorandum titled the “Baha’i Question,” which outlined a new approach. The “progress and development” of the Baha’i community was to be “blocked,” the memorandum said, in a long-term effort to eradicate the Baha’i community as a viable entity in the land where it began. Nor has the Iranian government ever revoked this policy.
The term “Baha’i Question” evokes similar ones used against religious minorities by oppressive governments of the past—revealing the intentions of the Islamic Republic. Baha’is are to be “expelled” from universities once their beliefs and religious identity become known, and companies should “deny them employment if they identify themselves as Bahá’ís,” the policy says. Students from Baha’i backgrounds should be placed in schools with “strong and imposing religious ideology,” it adds, and every aspect of their lives should be restricted.
Iranian authorities should also “be expelled from university” and “public employment,” and ensure their children are “enrolled in schools which have a strong and imposing religious ideology.” Baha’is also face, and continue to face, a torrent of propaganda and hate speech by official and semi-official media outlets and social media accounts each month in thousands of articles, broadcasts, and social media posts, across news agencies, school curriculum boards, and cultural programming. And there is no legal recourse for Bahá’ís to challenge these slurs without risking even more persecution. Baha’is are also banned from the right to respond to any of these accusations on public media.
More recent iterations of this strategy have come to light over the years: the most recent being a 2020 policy from Mazandaran province directing that the movements of Bahá’ís be “rigorously controlled” through the “monitoring of their operations.” A 2006 directive from the Ministry of Science and Research and Technology ordered the security offices of 81 public universities to expel Bahá’í students. Iran’s military headquarters also issued a 2005 letter ordering security agencies to “identify” and “monitor” Bahá’í individuals.
How else can Iranian authorities explain or justify their actions against the Baha’is? One of these concerns the case of Mahvash Sabet, 72 years old, who spent a decade in prison between 2008 and 2018 for serving on an informal leadership group that tended to the basic needs of Iran’s Baha’i community and with the government’s full knowledge.
Mahvash wrote poetry from her jail cell and was recognised by PEN International as a “Writer of Courage” in 2018—yet four years later she was arrested again. The judge presiding over her case rebuked Mahvash and a fellow detainee for “not having learned their lesson” during a one-hour trial. Shirin Ebadi, the Nobel Peace Prize laureate, represented Mahvash and her colleagues during her first trial and said the authorities did not have a “shred of evidence” for their charges. Now Mahvash has been sentenced to a second decade behind bars.
A more recent example from February 2025 concerns the case of Anisa Fanaian, a Bahá’í woman in Semnan, who was imprisoned for seven years after offering literacy support and basic education to Afghan refugee children excluded from the Iranian school system and who face discrimination in the country. Anisa was charged with “educational activities and propaganda against Islamic law,” and “propaganda against the regime,” while in reality she was just trying to help others. After being sentenced and imprisoned to serve her seven-year imprisonment, she wrote a moving letter from prison to the Afghan children she was teaching, saying:
The pain of discrimination I saw in your eyes—I know that pain. Yes, your pain is familiar to me. But I didn’t want to offer you only sympathy. In the face of darkness, I wanted to light a candle. So, I decided to tutor you. The hours I spent with you—when you came to class weary but eager, after long days of work in the scorching brick kilns—were among the most beautiful and precious moments of my life.
Her case represents hundreds of thousands of other Baha’is who are imprisoned simply for their beliefs and their services to society, which must be encouraged and promoted by their government rather than repressed.
Other recent incidents include the desecration of Baha’i cemeteries, the mass arrest of eleven Baha’i women even as United Nations and human rights experts warn that Iranian Baha’i women face escalating and intersectional persecution for their gender and their faith, the denial of legal compensation to the family of a Baha’i vigilante murder victim known for community service in the Bandar Abbas area, or the sentencing of ten other Baha’i women to a combined 90 years in prison. All of these are just the tip of a long spear of brutality and injustice which the Iranian government has tried to push into the Baha’i community for more than 46 years.
But the international community has been pushing back. In January 2025, 18 UN experts warned in an unprecedented joint statement that Baha’i women were under attack by the Islamic Republic. In April 2025, the European Commission imposed sanctions on parts of Iran’s judiciary over human rights abuses, including the persecution of Baha’is. The European Parliament also urged that Mahvash Sabet be released, without conditions, and 125 European parliamentarians joined UN experts to condemn human rights attacks on Baha’i women.
And a major report by Human Rights Watch, meanwhile, accused the Iranian government of the “crime against humanity of persecution,” regarding the situation of the Bahá’ís. And the Abdorrahman Boroumand Center for Human Rights in Iran explored in detail the direct, structural, and cultural violence that the Islamic Republic inflicts on the Baha’i community.
For 46 years the Iranian government has tried executions, arbitrary detention, interrogations and imprisonment, denial of education and employment, hate speech, and cultural cleansing in an effort to resolve its “Baha’i question.” None of the answers they have tried have ever been right.
Bahá’í International Community Geneva Office. Their work can be found on Instagram here and here, on Youtube, and via their website.
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