Iran | Champion Boxer Mohammad Javad Vafaei’s Death Sentence Upheld, Forwarded for Implementation

On December 15, 2025, Mohammad Javad Vafaei was notified at Vakilabad Prison in Mashhad that his request for a retrial had been rejected by the regime’s Supreme Court.

On the same day, Javad’s mother was unexpectedly granted an in-person visit with her son at Vakilabad Prison, a move that could signal his imminent execution. Furthermore, she was informed in a phone call from the prison that his sentence has been forwarded to the department for the implementation of sentences in Mashhad. His life is now in grave danger.

Javad, 30, a boxing champion and coach in Mashhad and a national silver medalist, was arrested in January 2020. After enduring severe torture, he was sentenced to death on charges of membership in the People’s Mojahedin Organization of Iran (PMOI/MEK). The regime’s Supreme Court has now upheld this sentence three times.

Since his arrest, Javad has been denied any medical leave and was also barred by the regime’s henchmen from attending his father’s funeral. His father, Mr. Seyed Ali Vafaei, passed away last November after his health deteriorated from the immense grief over the confirmation of his son’s death sentence.

The vindictiveness of the regime’s Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei, and its judiciary towards the PMOI and their families is beyond imagination. On August 29, 2025, Mr. Valiollah Daneshvar Kar, the father of political prisoner Shahrokh Daneshvar Kar, passed away.

Despite his illness, he had campaigned for his son on the streets, holding his picture and chanting, ‘No to execution.’ Shahrokh was not permitted to attend his father’s funeral. Similarly, in January 2025, when Mrs. Khadijeh Farsi—the mother of political prisoner Marzieh Farsi and the martyred PMOI member Hassan Farsi—passed away, Khamenei’s henchmen prevented Marzieh from attending her mother’s funeral. Three of her other children (Hossein, Azam, and Maryam) are PMOI members in Ashraf.

The Iranian Resistance once again calls on the United Nations and its relevant bodies, the European Union and its member states, and all human rights defenders to take urgent action to save the life of Mohammad Javad Vafaei and other political prisoners on death row.

Source: NCRI, Staff, December 16, 2025

"One is absolutely sickened, not by the crimes that the wicked have committed,
but by the punishments that the good have inflicted."

— Oscar Wilde

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