On the right to peaceful assembly.

ISAD operates as an international forum committed to documenting what the regime would prefer forgotten. We convene, document, and advocate — building the institutional habits a future Iran will need before it needs them. This letter is addressed to the governments of Europe, and to the international bodies that claim stewardship of universal rights.

The right to peaceful assembly is not a procedural courtesy. It is the mechanism by which citizens become a public — the means through which grievances acquire form, coalitions acquire voice, and power becomes accountable to the governed. Where assemblies are prohibited, dispersed, or made dangerous, politics is privatised: it retreats to rooms the state has not yet reached, and the civic infrastructure required for democratic transition quietly decays.

Since September 2022, the Islamic Republic has deployed lethal force against crowds gathered in the streets of Tehran, Mashhad, Sanandaj, and forty-seven other cities. The dead have been named. The detained have been numbered. This association has maintained a record, and the record does not permit the conclusion that what occurred was a policing operation rather than a political one.

02 · The obligation to act

The 1,247 signatories to this letter — students and young professionals resident across fourteen countries — call upon European governments to move beyond the language of concern. Concern, as a diplomatic category, is compatible with continued diplomatic normalisation. It does not interrupt trade delegations. It does not delay ambassadorial appointments. It does not condition the renewal of commercial treaties.

We ask for something more durable. We ask that the freedom to assemble, to protest, and to organise be treated as a precondition — not a preferred outcome — of any engagement with the Islamic Republic. We ask that the record of repression we have compiled be received as evidence, not as testimony to be weighed against other interests.

"An archive, properly maintained, is the slowest weapon a civic association possesses. It outlasts press cycles, ministerial reshuffles, and the news appetite of foreign desks."

03 · What we observe for the record

The association notes, and observes for the record, that the freedom to assemble is the precondition of every other civic right. Without it, the right to form political parties is meaningless. Without it, the right to petition the government is a private letter. Without it, the right to free elections is a procedure without a politics.

Twenty years from now, the historian writing the political biography of this period will reach not for a hashtag but for a folder. We are building that folder. We will continue to document. We will continue to convene. And we will continue to address ourselves to the governments and institutions of democratic states, for as long as they remain willing to receive correspondence from the diaspora of a country that has not yet arrived at its democracy.

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