About the Iran Holocaust Archive

Why this archive exists

Repression in the Islamic Republic has always outlasted the world's attention span. A crackdown produces a week of coverage, a UN statement, and then silence — while inside the country the arrests, trials and executions continue for years afterwards, largely unreported. Meanwhile the state's own account is written over the top: numbers revised down, victims recast as rioters, funerals policed, families made to sign retractions.

An archive answers that with permanence. A name that is written down, dated, sourced and translated into 41 languages is much harder to erase than a news report, a social-media thread or a single organisation's database. That is the whole ambition of this project: to make the record durable, checkable and impossible to quietly delete.

What the record covers

Editorial principles

• Named or nothing. Counts are built from named people. Aggregate claims without names are published as labelled estimates.
• Two independent strands. Nothing is presented as verified on a single source.
• Dated figures. Every number carries the date it was last confirmed.
• Sources visible. Claims link to the originating monitor, document or report, not to another aggregator.
• Corrections are public. Errors are fixed and logged, not silently overwritten.
• Dignity of the dead. No gratuitous imagery of bodies; graphic material is used only where it is evidentially necessary and is captioned as such.
• Safety first. No detail is published that would identify a source inside Iran.

The full sourcing and verification rules are set out in Methodology, and the reference list in Sources.

Why 41 languages

Persian and English are not enough. The people who most need this record are Iranians inside the country reading through censorship, Kurdish, Azerbaijani, Baluchi and Arab communities inside Iran whose losses are reported least, and diaspora communities whose second language is German, Swedish, Dutch, Turkish or Japanese. Publishing in 41 languages also makes the archive harder to suppress: no single takedown, jurisdiction or platform decision removes it everywhere.

Translations are reviewed for fluency rather than produced word-for-word, and every localised page carries the same sources as the English original. If you find a translation that reads awkwardly or misstates a fact, report it through the contact page — language reports are treated as corrections.

Using and reusing the archive

The written record and the datasets are CC BY 4.0: republish, translate, print and teach with them, with attribution. Teachers will find ready-made material on the teaching page; journalists should start with the press kit; researchers can pull the raw data from victims.json and timeline.json.

Frequently asked questions

What exactly is iranholocaust.org?

An independent, non-commercial, multilingual archive of documented repression in the Islamic Republic of Iran since 1979. It combines named victim records, a dated chronology, explainer pages, a research journal and primary-source citations, published in 41 languages and released under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0.

Is the site affiliated with a political party or opposition group?

No. It endorses no party, government or opposition faction, takes no funding from any state, and applies the same evidentiary standard to every claim regardless of who makes it. Where opposition figures or groups make claims, those claims are labelled and sourced like any other.

Why use the word “holocaust”?

As a description of scale and intent in the ordinary sense of the word — mass destruction of human life by a state — not as an equivalence with the Shoah. The name is a deliberate refusal of the euphemisms (“unrest”, “incidents”, “clashes”) that have made four decades of state killing sound administrative.

How is the archive funded?

It is non-commercial. There is no advertising, no paywall, no tracking of readers and no sponsored content. Running costs are hosting and translation, which are minimal by design so that the record cannot be captured by a funder.

How can I correct or contribute to the record?

Send the page URL, the disputed passage and the evidence through the contact page. Corrections that are supported by sources are made and logged. Families and survivors who want a person added, amended or removed are given priority, and removal requests from families are honoured.