Iran executed dual Iranian-German citizen Jamshid Sharmahd on Monday. German Foreign Minister Annalaena Barbock stated: “I condemn the murder of Jamshid Sharmahd by the Iranian regime in the strongest possible terms. Jamshid Sharmahd was abducted to Iran from Dubai, held for years without a fair trial, and has now been killed.”
Sharmahd was first arrested in 2020 in Dubai, where he was abducted by Iranian agents, taken to Iran, and promptly accused of leading a monarchist opposition group within the country. During his trial, Sharmahd’s government-appointed lawyer requested $250,000 and would not provide any legal representation beyond attending court until compensated. Subsequently, Sharmahd was accused of “corruption of the earth,” a vague criminal charge used to penalize an indeterminate number of “moral” offenses against the state. He was convicted in what Amnesty International called a “sham trial.” Leading up to his execution, Sharmahd was subject to frequent isolation and torture, spending nearly 1000 days in solitary confinement, causing him to lose his teeth and become dangerously underweight.
Germany had repeatedly petitioned the government to release Sharmahd, and in its post-execution statement emphasized that the government had “lobbied tirelessly on Jamshid Sharmahd’s behalf and we worked on this case every day also here in Berlin. We sent a high-ranking team of the Federal Foreign Office to Tehran on several occasions for this purpose. We made it crystal clear to Tehran time and again that the execution of a German national would have severe consequences.” German chancellor Olaf Scholz also commented on the execution on X, referring to it as a “scandal I condemn in the strongest possible terms.”
Under Article 9 of the United Nations Human Declaration of Rights (UNHDR), every global citizen is entitled to freedom from “arbitrary arrest, detention, and exile.” Moreover, Article 14 of the International Covenant of Civil and Political Rights, a human rights treaty of which Iran is a signatory, states: “No one shall be deprived of his liberty except on such grounds and in accordance with such procedure as are established by law.”
