News Center — Twenty-six academics, writers, and political and human rights activists from various countries have addressed an open letter to political prisoners in Iran, declaring their solidarity with them, and calling for an end to executions and the release of political detainees, coinciding with calls to end military attacks and US and Israeli sanctions imposed on Iran.

The letter, titled "A Letter of Solidarity with Political Prisoners in Iran: Stop Imperialist War and Government Executions," was signed by a number of prominent academic and political figures, including prominent American philosopher, writer, and activist Angela Davis, as well as academic, writer, and activist Kiyanga-Yamata Taylor, and Ruth Wilson Gilmore, an academic and researcher on prison issues and social justice.

The Letter Stated:

"To our brothers and sisters in humanity! To civilian activists, students, thinkers, workers, prisoners of conscience, and artists held behind the walls of prisons and detention centers across Iran, we write to you with deep solidarity, with hearts heavy with awareness of the scale of injustice you endure in prisons: torture, systematic neglect, strangulation and repression, and the terrifying reality of show trials and executions. We, former and current political prisoners, anti-authoritarian and anti-imperialist activists and researchers, and supporters of prison abolition, follow you across geographical distances, through the silence of censorship and internet blackouts. We stand with you in solidarity and alliance—you who are caught at the intersection of two oppressive forces."

"On one hand, you face the Islamic Republic, a system built from its inception on an exclusionary ideology seeking to impose absolute social and political dominance. It is a government that claims to confront imperialist powers, yet uses the same logic of domination, and the same mechanisms of imprisonment, torture, and execution."

"On the other hand, you face the aggression and violence of the very imperialist and Zionist powers that the Islamic Republic claims to resist. The United States and Israel are waging brutal wars, destroying civilian infrastructure, killing innocent girls in elementary schools, and treating you as mere collateral damage in their pursuit of regional hegemony."

"We have not forgotten the disaster of June 23, 2025, when Israel attacked Evin Prison complex, destroying its clinic, the prisoners' wing, and the visitation center. You yourselves expressed this double repression when you said: 'We feel caught between the blades of a pair of scissors: an evil system that imprisons and tortures us, and an external force that bombs us in the name of freedom.'"

"Over the past year, we have witnessed both blades of this scissors tighten. We see arbitrary arrests and the horrifying wave of government executions. We see the increasing criminalization of the working class and the unemployed, how Kurds, Arabs, and Baloch are targeted, and how Afghan migrants are held responsible. All this is nothing but a desperate attempt to break the spirit and will of a people they cannot subdue. This is the same logic followed by prison systems around the world: when you cannot solve the crises you yourselves have created for people, you criminalize them or try to remove them from the scene."

"We see the same logic of domination in the place where Israel holds Palestinian political prisoners for years without charge, under the pretext of 'administrative detention.' We saw how Israeli officials celebrated the passage of a new law allowing them to execute Palestinian political prisoners they could not subdue. We see it too in the detention centers and prisons of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement, where the US government incarcerates our people and arrests our political activists because they have the courage to speak out against the genocide Israel is committing with US support. We see the same logic in US history—in the targeting of freedom fighters, particularly Black, Indigenous, Puerto Rican, and other anti-colonial activists—and in imprisoning them for decades to break liberation movements and any attempt at self-determination."

"We see the close connections between these prison systems—systems that exchange information, experiences, and methods of governance with one another. Examples of these connections include Marion Prison in Illinois, which in the 1960s became a model for building prisons in Iran and Israel. Whether it is a border wall or a prison gate, the goal is the same: silencing humans through intimidation, domination, and isolation."

"Your struggle is as global as our collective dream of freedom and human dignity. We stand with you and reject the false and empty dichotomy between imperialism and anti-imperialism. We call on global civil society, anti-imperialist activists and organizations, to expand their unconditional support and solidarity with all our detained comrades who struggle for our collective liberation. We ask them to establish lasting connections with political prisoners in Iran and to amplify their voices. We want them, by challenging the Islamic Republic's official narrative, to pressure this government to immediately end all executions and release political prisoners."

"Officials in the Islamic Republic must now stop the policy of executions and inhumane imprisonment. The United States and Israel must also end their brutal wars and harsh sanctions that deliberately destroy our communities."