Ban the Hangman's Regime From the World Cup |
There are moments when the international community’s silence becomes complicity. Iran is approaching one of those moments now. In a grim theatre of state terror, the Tehran regime appears poised to hang a national sports champion, boxing hero Mohammad Javad Vafaei Sani, despite growing international outrage. If the world allows this execution to proceed, then it should at least have the honesty to admit that slogans about “sport transcending politics” are meaningless. A regime that uses the gallows as a political weapon has no place on the world’s sporting stage, least of all at the football World Cup.
The life of Mohammad Javad Vafaei Sani, a 30-year-old boxing champion and coach from Mashhad, is in imminent danger. On December 15, 2025, prison authorities informed him that the regime’s Supreme Court had rejected his request for a retrial. On the same day, officials chillingly told his mother by phone that his death sentence had been sent to the department responsible for implementing executions. In Iran’s penal lexicon, that bureaucratic phrase translates into one thing, the final countdown to a state-sanctioned killing.
Alarm bells rang even louder when his mother was suddenly granted an in-person visit that very day, a grim hallmark of cases approaching the gallows. These moves followed a week of heightened pressure. On December 6, Vafaei was transferred to solitary confinement and all communications with Vakilabad Prison, the central prison in Mashhad, were cut. Anyone familiar with the regime’s methods understands what this means. The noose is being prepared.
Vafaei’s case exposes the Iranian judiciary for what it truly is, not an independent court system, but an........