SW News: Human Rights Watch warned that as part of a pattern of grave abuses, Iran's security forces have unlawfully killed, tortured and sexually abused minors.

Iranian authorities have also detained, questioned, and prosecuted children in violation of legal protections, and judges have prohibited the hiring of lawyers for the children's families to defend them.

Additionally, judges have found children guilty of crimes without clear-cut evidence and tried them outside of the youth courts, which have exclusive jurisdiction over children's cases. Security personnel have taken children into custody and held them without informing their families, sometimes for weeks.

After being freed from custody, students have either been forbidden from going back to school or their families have been prevented from accessing social services, forcing the kids to work.

Between September 2022 and February 2023, Human Rights Watch looked into 11 allegations of child abuse and discovered new information about two cases that had already been recorded.

People calling for fundamental change have been violently suppressed by the Iranian government. Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and other rights organizations have provided evidence of the frequent use of fatal force on protesters, including children.

Human Rights Watch stated that the United Nations Fact-Finding Mission on Iran should look into these serious abuses against children as part of its overall reporting on the Iranian government's ongoing violations of human rights.

In the course of protests that started in late August 2022 after Mahsa Jina Amini died in police detention, Iranian rights organizations had tallied 537 deaths by security forces by early April 2023, including at least 68 minors. Children's deaths have previously been covered by Human Rights Watch, including those of 16-year-old Nika Shakarami, whose family discovered her body 10 days after she vanished during protests in Tehran on September 20, and 16-year-old Sarina Esmailzadeh, who died on September 23 in Gohardasht, Alborz province, after being beaten by security forces. Authorities in Iran asserted that both girls died after falling or jumping off buildings, and they harassed and arrested relatives.