SW News: Given the dire situation in Iran, Amnesty International has praised the creation of a fact-finding team to look into human rights breaches in the country as long overdue.

The cries of the Iranian people for justice have finally been heard, Amnesty's Secretary-General Agnes Callamard said in response to the UN Human Rights Council's announcement on Thursday that the "landmark" resolution had been approved.

It not only increases the level of international scrutiny of the grave circumstances, but also establishes a procedure for gathering, assembling, and preserving essential evidence for subsequent prosecutions.

The fact-finding trip is being held after Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old Kurdish woman, was killed while being held by Iran's infamous morality police in custody. It is alleged that she died after being tortured in custody. Her death has fueled widespread protests across the country. They are marked by the public burning of hijabs and cutting of hair. A brutal crackdown by security agencies has resulted in hundreds of deaths and thousands of incarcerations. This is the biggest protest witnessed in the country since the 1979 revolution.

Amnesty stated that during the negotiations for the resolution, Iranian authorities persisted in rejecting the recommendations of UN experts and human rights groups. They continued to use excessive amounts of unlawful lethal force and sought the death penalty for protestors.

Iran has faced repeated cycles of protests since 2018, all of which have been met with violent reprisals. Human Rights Activists News Agency said 450 protesters had been killed in over two months of nationwide unrest as of November 26, including 63 minors. It said 60 members of the security forces had been killed, and 18,173 protesters had been detained.

While past waves of significant protests were put down by the government, the current turmoil has presented one of the biggest threats to Iran's religious ruling elite since it came to power in the 1979 Islamic revolution.

Although Iran has not released a death toll for demonstrators, deputy foreign minister Ali Bagheri Kani claimed that over 50 police officers had perished and hundreds were injured in the protest.