There are places whose importance cannot be measured in bricks and concrete. They are witnesses to history — and sometimes witnesses to crimes.
For Iran, Gohardasht Prison is such a place.
On Sept. 13, Iranian authorities began a new phase in the demolition of the notorious prison in Karaj, west of Tehran. State media showed the walls coming down as officials announced that the site would be cleared for residential or commercial development. The head of Iran’s prisons organization said the demolition was proceeding under direct instructions from the head of the judiciary and that all of the prison’s surrounding walls would be destroyed within a month.
But Gohardasht is not simply an obsolete prison occupying valuable urban land. It is a possible crime scene — one of the principal sites of the 1988 massacre of political prisoners in Iran.
Its destruction, therefore, raises an urgent question that should concern every government represented at the United Nations: Will Tehran be allowed to destroy physical evidence of one of the gravest chapters in Iran’s modern history before that evidence can be independently examined and preserved?
The timing makes this especially urgent. As world leaders gather in New York for the U.N. General Assembly, thousands of Iranians will rally outside the U.N. against executions in Iran and call for accountability for those responsible for past and present atrocities. Their message connects two chapters of the same story: the impunity surrounding the mass executions of the past and the executions being carried out today.
Gohardasht was one of the principal killing grounds of 1988. Survivors have described its corridors, isolation cells, torture chambers, and the infamous “Death Hall,” where political prisoners were taken during the massacre.
The People’s Mojahedin Organization of Iran, or PMOI/MEK, documented the prison’s layout and survivor accounts decades ago. Those accounts later assumed extraordinary evidentiary importance during the Swedish prosecution of former Iranian prison official Hamid Noury. Witnesses provided testimony, sketches, and three-dimensional reconstructions detailing Gohardasht and what occurred inside it.
The Noury case demonstrated that even decades after an atrocity, evidence can survive, witnesses can testify, and those accused of responsibility can be brought before a court. That is precisely why the destruction of Gohardasht matters.
Architectural features can corroborate survivors’ accounts and help establish how prisoners were moved from their cells to interrogation rooms and execution sites. Documents or physical objects may also retain evidentiary importance. Once bulldozers reduce the site to rubble, such evidence may disappear forever.
And Gohardasht does not stand alone.
For years, Iranian authorities have faced accusations of interfering with burial sites associated with the mass executions of political prisoners, including sites in Khavaran, Tabriz, Mashhad, and Ahvaz. In August 2025, Plot 41 of Tehran’s Behesht-e Zahra cemetery, containing the graves of thousands of PMOI members executed in 1981, was destroyed and leveled with heavy machinery.
The international community has already been warned about this pattern. In his July 2024 report, then-U.N. special rapporteur on Iran Javaid Rehman stated that Iranian authorities had initiated what he described as a systematic campaign to destroy mass graves associated with thousands of political prisoners executed in 1988. He warned that this compounded the suffering of victims’ families while obstructing efforts to establish the truth and hold those responsible accountable.
More than three decades ago, I had the privilege of representing the U.S. on the U.N. Commission on Human Rights in Geneva and heading the American delegation there. During that period, the international community was already confronting the Iranian government’s human rights record.
That experience left me with an enduring lesson: International scrutiny matters, but scrutiny without accountability is not enough.
Resolutions, investigations, and survivor testimony matter. But so does preserving evidence that could establish individual responsibility. If evidence is permitted to disappear and perpetrators come to believe that the passage of time will shield them from justice, documentation alone cannot end impunity.
Iranian authorities may say that the prison was closed years ago, that Karaj has expanded around it, and that redevelopment serves legitimate economic purposes. But none of those arguments answers the essential question: Why destroy a site associated with alleged crimes against humanity before independent investigators have been permitted to examine and document it?
The U.N. should urgently call on Tehran to halt any further demolition that could destroy historically or forensically significant evidence at Gohardasht until independent experts can document the site. Governments should demand the preservation of prison registers, architectural plans, execution records, photographs, personnel files, and other archives associated with the prison.
The same principle must apply to suspected mass graves throughout Iran. Such sites should be protected from interference until independent forensic examinations can be conducted.
This is not about preserving a prison as a monument.
It is about preserving a crime scene for justice.
The families of the victims of 1988 have already endured nearly four decades without accountability. Many were denied the bodies of their loved ones or even knowledge of where they were buried. They should not now be forced to watch the physical evidence disappear as well.
This is why the voices of thousands of Iranians gathering outside the United Nations this month carry particular significance. Their demand for an end to executions is inseparable from their demand for accountability. The absence of accountability for yesterday’s atrocities creates the conditions in which abuses can recur.
Having represented the U.S. at the U.N.’s principal human rights body, I believe this is precisely the moment when international human rights institutions must demonstrate their purpose. The international community should not wait until Gohardasht has disappeared and then lament the destruction of evidence.
Nearly four decades after the 1988 massacre, the families of its victims are still waiting for truth and justice.
Concrete can be pulverized. Prison walls can be torn down. Cemeteries can be bulldozed.
History cannot.
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The U.N. must help preserve the evidence required to prosecute those responsible.
The bulldozers are already at Gohardasht. The time to act is now.
Ambassador J. Kenneth Blackwell is a senior fellow for human rights and constitutional governance at the Family Research Council and former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations Human Rights Commission. He is on X @kenblackwell