He was arrested in 2020 for participating in anti-government protests. Sentenced to death for belonging to an illegal organization, Iranian boxer Mohammad Javad Vafaei-Sani risks an “imminent” execution after the rejection of his request for a new trial, NGOs and the opposition in exile warned on Wednesday.
The World Boxing Council (WBC), one of the main international boxing federations, and sports personalities, including the former world number 1 tennis player, Martina Navratilova, had called on Iran to spare the 30-year-old boxer, national vice-champion. He was accused of being a member of the People’s Mojahedin (MEK), an organization banned in Iran, which led to his death sentence for “corruption on earth”.
He was informed this week that his request for a new trial had been rejected by the Iranian Supreme Court and that his case had been transferred to the office in charge of the execution of sentences, said the NGO Human Rights Activists News Agency (HRANA), based in the United States. Iranian official media did not report the matter on Wednesday.
At the same time, the boxer’s mother was “unexpectedly” allowed to visit him in prison, HRANA noted. It is common in Iran for relatives to be able to pay a final visit to the condemned as their execution approaches. “His life is now in great danger,” responded the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI), the political branch of the MEK, in a statement.
1,426 executed in 2025
NCRI spokesperson Shahin Ghobadi told AFP that the boxer was “affiliated” with the organization and that the authorities tried to force him to break away through “intensive use of torture”. Mahmood Amiry-Moghaddam, director of the NGO based in Norway Iran Human Rightsestimated that the boxer faced an “imminent” execution and that he had been “tortured to extract a forced confession”.
In November, more than 20 athletes, including former American tennis player Martina Navratilova and former British swimmer Sharron Davies, in a statement urged governments to act to save Mohammad Javad Vafaei-Sani. His execution would be “a warning to any athlete daring to take a stand,” they said.
The president of the World Boxing Council, Mauricio Sulaiman Saldivar, also judged that this execution would be an attack on “fundamental values of sport and human dignity”. According to NGOs, major repression has been at work in Iran since June, with an increase in recourse to the death penalty. According to IHR, at least 1,426 people were hanged from January to the end of November 2025.
