Human rights lawyer Khosro Alikordi dies suddenly after sustained state pressure, prompting prison protests, a nationwide lawyers’ statement, and scrutiny of Iran’s war on defenders and the right to life.
In the world of Iranian political prisoners and bereaved families, Khosro Alikordi was a crucial point of reference. A 46-year-old human rights lawyer based in Mashhad and a member of the Khorasan Bar Association – the regional professional body that licenses and oversees lawyers in north-eastern Iran – he spent the last years of his life defending those the Islamic Republic most wanted to silence: protesters of the 2022–23 “Woman, Life, Freedom” uprising, political dissidents, and families seeking justice for their killed children.
Among his clients were the family of Abolfazl Adinezadeh, a teenager shot dead during the “Woman, Life, Freedom” protests, and the imprisoned political activist Fatemeh Sepehri, a veteran dissident and outspoken critic of the Islamic Republic’s leadership who is now serving a heavy sentence on political charges. For many other “nameless” detainees and their relatives, he was the person who would pick up the phone, show up in court, and insist on basic legal guarantees in a system built to deny them.
The price was high. In the months before his death, Alikordi was under mounting pressure from judicial and security bodies. The Mashhad Revolutionary Court and the disciplinary court of the Khorasan Bar both went after him for what should be the core of a lawyer’s work: defending his clients and speaking of their rights. In Dey 1403 he was sentenced to one year in prison, two years’ ban from practicing law, two years’ travel ban, and two years’ ban on online activity. Yet, by all accounts, he kept working with families of the killed and supporting the “No to Execution Tuesdays” campaign – publicly backing it, representing some prisoners facing execution, and helping to carry their demands outside prison walls – until the very end.
A sudden death in a sealed office
On Friday night, 5 December 2025 (14 Azar 1404), Alikordi was found dead in his office in Mashhad. Officials in Razavi Khorasan quickly announced the cause as “heart failure”. Police immediately placed his office under security restrictions.
Formally, it was a sudden natural death. Politically, almost nothing about it felt natural. This was a middle-aged lawyer, under active prosecution, with open cases and fresh “file-building” against him, found lifeless in a controlled professional space that was then locked down by security forces. His funeral, held on 7 December in Sabzevar, took place under a heavy security presence despite the large crowd that came to say goodbye. His brother, Javad Alikordi, spoke publicly about the years of security pressures, the open cases, and his brother’s periods of detention.
Within hours of the news, messages began circulating from human rights defenders and families of victims. Nobel Peace Prize laureates Shirin Ebadi and Narges Mohammadi both paid tribute to a lawyer who devoted himself to “anonymous and vulnerable prisoners” rather than high-profile political cases. Lawyer Babak Paknia published a screenshot of his last conversation with Alikordi and wrote that “they did not leave him alone until the very last moment”, referring to fresh attempts to fabricate new charges.
Taken together – the official story of “heart attack”, the security cordon around his office, his recent sentence and ongoing harassment, the pattern of pressure on rights lawyers – these elements turned a reported medical incident into a deeply political death.
A lawyer of the “No to Execution” movement
The shock of Alikordi’s death was felt especially strongly inside Iran’s prisons. For nearly two years, political prisoners and ordinary inmates have sustained the “No to Execution Tuesdays” campaign: weekly, coordinated hunger strikes in dozens of prisons, from Evin and Ghezel Hesar to Zahedan, Rasht and Sanandaj. These strikes, joined at various points by prisoners with very different charges, have turned Tuesday into a recurring day of collective refusal against the machinery of death.
In its 98th weekly statement, the campaign reported that prisoners in 55 prisons had joined the hunger strike and documented an explosion of executions: 95 people hanged in a single week, including two women, and more than 200 executions in just the first 17 days of Azar. “In today’s Iran,” the statement said, “execution is not a punishment but an organized crime and a systematic violation of the right to life.”
In the same text, they also mourned Alikordi as one of their own: a “justice-seeking” lawyer – someone whose work is tied not just to legal procedure, but to the broader struggle for justice and accountability. He had been an ally of the campaign and one of the few legal professionals who consistently tried to defend those facing death sentences or retaliatory charges.
For prisoners who see cellmates taken to the gallows at dawn, a lawyer like Alikordi is more than a professional service provider; he is a fragile line of connection to the outside world, a witness who can carry their stories beyond the prison walls. His sudden death, framed in official terms as a simple heart failure, therefore reads from their perspective as yet another act in the same drama: a state that kills on the gallows, terrorizes in the courtroom, and outlives its critics.
Lawyers push back: 82 signatures demanding the truth
If political prisoners responded with grief and anger, the legal community reacted with something closer to open alarm. A group of 82 lawyers from different cities and political currents signed a public statement of solidarity with Alikordi’s family and demanded a thorough, technical and impartial investigation into the circumstances of his death.
Among the signatories were prominent rights lawyers like Nasrin Sotoudeh, Abdolfattah Soltani, Amir Raisian and Mohammad Seyfzadeh – figures who themselves know what it means to be targeted for doing their jobs. Their letter described Alikordi as a “decent and honourable lawyer” whose loss is “a painful and irreparable blow to the legal community of the country.”
The statement calls explicitly for:
• A careful, expert-level inquiry into the cause of death
• The rapid release of all documents and medical/legal reports to his family
• Full transparency and clarity “without any ambiguity or omission”
The signatories also declare their readiness, as legal professionals, to accompany the family in any truth-finding process and to use their expertise to defend the family’s rights and access to information. Between the lines, the message is clear: the official one-line explanation of “heart attack” is not enough, and given the context of ongoing repression of rights lawyers, trust in the authorities’ narrative is extremely low.
This collective intervention by 82 lawyers does something important. It refuses to treat Alikordi’s death as an isolated misfortune and instead links it to a structural question: whether lawyers who defend political defendants can expect any real safety, or whether they too are increasingly becoming targets – through prosecution, bans, imprisonment, and now unexplained deaths.
What Khosro Alikordi’s death tells us
Several threads converge in the story of Khosro Alikordi.
First, he embodies the shrinking space for legal defence in politically sensitive cases. When a lawyer can be criminally prosecuted, banned from work, and subjected to new “file-building” simply for representing protesters’ families or opposing execution, the right to defence becomes largely fictitious. His death, occurring under these conditions, underlines how exposed such lawyers are.
Second, the reactions it provoked – from prisoners on hunger strike in 55 prisons to 82 lawyers on the outside – show the emergence of a fragile but real ecosystem of resistance. Political prisoners, ordinary inmates, bereaved families, rights lawyers and exiled figures like Ebadi and Mohammadi are not acting in isolation; they read each other’s statements, respond across walls and borders, and recognize one another as parts of the same struggle.
Third, the official handling of his death fits a familiar pattern: rapid medicalized explanation, security sealing of the scene, and no transparent communication with the family or public. It is a pattern that fuels suspicion not only in this case, but in every future unexplained death under pressure.
Finally, Alikordi’s story connects two core crises of the Islamic Republic: the crisis of life and the crisis of law. On one side, a state that uses execution on an industrial scale and relies on fear of death to govern. On the other, a legal system in which those who try to defend the condemned or the bereaved are themselves punished and, in some cases, die under circumstances that demand answers.
Khosro Alikordi’s clients will now have to fight on without him. The prisoners who went on hunger strike in the 98th “No to Execution” Tuesday did so in a country where, in just over two weeks, more than 200 people were executed. The 82 lawyers who signed their names under a demand for truth know that their own safety is not guaranteed.
This is precisely why his death matters beyond the individual tragedy. It has become a test of whether the legal community and broader society can force even minimal transparency from a system that prefers opacity – and whether the fragile front line of justice-seeking lawyers in Iran can survive long enough to keep defending those who have no one else.
