From September 2022 to September 2023, at least 500 people were killed by Iranian security forces, tens of thousands were arrested, nine men were executed after sham trials, and thousands of people, including children, were tortured. Their crime: peacefully participating in the Woman, Life, Freedom movement. The protests were galvanized by the death of Jina Mahsa Amini on September 16, 2022. Amini was a young woman who was detained by the regime’s morality police for allegedly “improperly” wearing her hijab. People took to the streets across the country to protest the actions of the Iranian government and its treatment of women. Security forces immediately responded with violence.
This brutal crackdown, however, did not stop the movement from sharing its message with the world. Protesters and bystanders used their cell phones to take photos and videos of what they saw around them. At great personal risk, they uploaded them to social media platforms with hashtags like #WomanLifeFreedom and #زن زندگی آزادی.
The Strategic Litigation Project (SLP) at the Atlantic Council (where one of us works) recognized the value of this user-generated content as potential evidence of human rights violations and crimes against humanity committed by the Islamic Republic of Iran. SLP could see this evidence would be crucial to future accountability efforts. The amount of content being shared online was astounding and at the same time vulnerable, with material being removed from platforms daily. For that reason, SLP brought together civil society organizations and academic institutions to form the Iran Digital Archive Coalition. It began its work in Spring 2023, identifying, preserving, and verifying social media and other digital content that documented instances of violence by Iranian security forces. Mnemonic, an NGO known for hosting similar archives documenting conflict situations, joined the effort and built the Iranian Archive, allowing all members of the Coalition to contribute.
The strength and success of the coalition comes from the complementary expertise of its members. Our civil society partners bring expertise on the Iranian context (the Iran Human Rights Documentation Center), human rights documentation and advocacy (Amnesty International), international justice and accountability (SLP), and archiving (the Azadi Archive). Our academic partners (The Digital Investigations Lab at UCLA Law and the Human Rights Center at UC Berkeley) bring expertise in open-source investigations and are training the next generation of students to engage in this important work. Together, the partners and their collaborators collected more than 2 million pieces of content that document the Woman, Life, Freedom protests and actions against them by Iranian security forces from September 2022 onwards.
The content in the Iranian Archive demonstrates a wide range of violations including the crime against humanity of gender persecution, enforced disappearances, targeted blindings, arbitrary detentions, and arbitrary killings. The content in the Iranian Archive is forensically preserved using best practices developed by Mnemonic to establish chain of custody, authenticity, and other key elements to ensure it can be used as evidence in future accountability proceedings. From this content, the Coalition has produced a series of reports that document and analyze some of the instances of gender persecution, enforced disappearance, and targeted blinding of protesters and bystanders.
In November 2022, only a few months after the protests began, the United Nations Human Rights Council adopted a resolution to establish the Independent International Fact-finding Mission on Iran (the “FFMI”). The FFMI’s mandate was to “thoroughly and independently investigate alleged human rights violations in the Islamic Republic of Iran related to the protests that began on 16 September 2022, especially with respect to women and children,” and to “collect, consolidate and analyse evidence of such violations and preserve evidence, including in view of cooperation in any legal proceedings.” Unlike other UN fact-finding bodies, the FFMI has a unique dual mandate to investigate both human rights violations and international crimes with the goal of collaborating with future legal and accountability proceedings.
The Coalition quickly mobilized and began supporting the work of the FFMI and sharing evidence that we had gathered. Materials tagged in the archive identified weapons used by security forces against civilian protestors, violations ranging from blinding, poisoning, arrests and detention, death and destruction of property, gender-based violence and attacks on children, and more. Teams of students working with the Coalition worked on verifying and analyzing key videos indicating patterns of violence. These included patterns of gender crimes, blinding of protestors, and attacks against children. The footage shared was indicative of international crimes, and the Coalition was determined to preserve this material for a future in which justice would be possible.
In its March 2024 report to the UN Human Rights Council, the FFMI found credible evidence that the Iranian government committed crimes against humanity, including murder, torture, and gender persecution, in addition to numerous grave human rights violations. This was the first time a UN body identified crimes against humanity perpetrated by the Iran against its own civilians. In its following March 2025 report, the FFMI experts found that, despite promises from a new president, Iran has only “ramp[ed] up efforts to restrict the rights of women and girls, and others demanding human rights as part of a concerted effort to crush dissent.” In both reports, the FFMI stressed the lack of domestic options for accountability and highlighted the impunity that the Iranian government enjoys, including retaliations against victims and survivors who demand justice.
The FFMI experts acknowledged that the only real options for accountability lie outside Iran and encouraged other States to launch investigations into the crimes committed by Iranian security forces. To assist the international community, the experts developed a roadmap for justice, accountability, and reparations in which they highlight that many of the Woman, Life, Freedom victims and survivors currently reside outside Iran and that perpetrators have assets in and travel to other countries, including those which have jurisdiction over certain international crimes regardless of where they are committee. The FFMI also has a confidential list of alleged perpetrators they will share with interested national authorities. Additionally, the FFMI has interviewed over 300 victims, survivors, and witnesses, and collected and verified over 38,000 pieces of evidence.
Helping such investigations and accountability proceedings is one of the main reasons the Iran Digital Archive Coalition began its work to preserve crucial evidence—evidence which may otherwise have been lost or deleted in the years before any proceedings could begin. In the next installment in this series, members of the Coalition will describe their open-source investigation into specific incidents of the crime against humanity of gender persecution. In the final piece, the FFMI experts will detail their findings and their call to action for accountability. Woman, Life, Freedom victims and survivors have been asking the world to help them in their pursuit of justice. It is time to amplify their calls and turn these cries for justice into reality.
