From Nuremberg to PS752, and what democracies still refuse to learn about justice
Last night I watched James Vanderbilt’s Nuremberg and, like almost any other filmmaker, I could not help second-guessing how I would have done it differently. I forced myself to move past that natural urge and focus instead on the real reason such films need to be made. For me, the film is yet another pretext to revisit my own obsessive preoccupation: justice, and what that word has come to mean for Iranians. What can we learn from history to shape our future?
The Woman, Life, Freedom movement in Iran inspired me to conceive a project that uses the historic Nuremberg trial site as a setting to examine justice in the aftermath of the inevitable demise of the Islamic regime in Iran. It is an aspirational project that I have yet to realize, given the obstacles I continue to face.
From my early days as a court interpreter and law clerk for refugees, to my activism and, of course, the realization of my passion for filmmaking, I have spent most of my professional life grappling with a deeply unsettling question: What is justice for the victims of state atrocities? If justice would mean to have their loved ones back, why fight for it? What is the difference between justice and revenge and why is revenge not tantamount to justice? How do survivors overcome the desire for revenge? What can truly bring justice for Mandela’s lost years in prison, nearly three decades of his life? Or for Iran’s longest-serving political prisoner, Abbas Amir-Entezam, who was unjustly imprisoned for nearly two decades under the most brutal conditions?
My recent involvement in the case of the downing of Ukrainian Flight PS752 has brought this question into sharper focus than ever before.
During the turbulent years I spent in Iran between 1998 and 2003, I made three films. The first and third were, in my own way, about justice.
Silence Between Two Thoughts (2003) was my last film in Iran. It was confiscated and led to my arrest and subsequent exile. The film opens with a tight shot of a man executing prisoners and ends with him swarmed by an angry mob, while the tyrant mullah who ordered the executions is nowhere to be found. The crowd vents its rage on the visible functionary. The architect of their suffering is absent, untouched. Against the same wall where the executions took place at the beginning of the film stands the sole survivor, a young girl spared because she is a virgin and, under that grotesque logic, can only be executed after being married off to the executioner. She is now free, but stands with her back against the same wall, facing an uncertain future.
That final image was my attempt at showing how “justice” usually looks in practice: the expendable hand is sacrificed, the system walks away, and the victims remain alone with their loss, consumed by rage, waiting for the cycle of injustice to repeat.
I escaped imprisonment by the Islamic Republic in part because of the international outcry over the murder of Iranian-Canadian photojournalist Zahra Kazemi in an Iranian prison, which coincided with my own unrelated arrest when my film was confiscated. I left Iran under duress, knowing that I might never see my country of birth again. Since then, there have been more atrocities, more murders, more mass graves, more prisoners of conscience, torture, rape, and persecution. Injustice is not a malfunction of the system; it is the fuel that keeps the Islamic regime in Iran running.
In one of those episodes of barbarity, in 2013, I wrote an article on executions in Iran titled “Capital Punishment in the Punishment Capital of the World.” I ended it with these words:
“… All I can do is express my own shame and deep sorrow. I personally can neither forget nor forgive. Can you?”
At the time, I did not know how thoroughly my life in Canada would be tied to what was to unfold in Iran less than a decade later.
A World High on “Forgive but Never Forget”
As the 1990s arrived, the Soviet empire imploded. Nelson Mandela was freed. Eastern Europe crawled out of the authoritarian ice age. Apartheid was eventually declared over.
The West, and many who saw themselves as stakeholders of democracy and human rights, rushed into a “new world order” with a kind of intoxicated optimism. Mandela’s mantra, “forgive but never forget”, was lifted out of its specific South African context and turned into a self-serving global slogan.
The same decade that celebrated the defeat of the Soviet Union also delivered the Gulf War, the Yugoslav wars, the genocides in Bosnia and Herzegovina and Rwanda, the civil war in Somalia, and atrocities in Chechnya and Sierra Leone. The kumbaya chorus of a “Western world” high on its illusion of victory in the Cold War continued even as mass graves were being filled.
For regimes like Iran’s, this was the perfect climate: a world eager to “move on”, to prioritize stability, trade, and photo-ops over the hard, slow, but necessary work of accountability and justice.
Under that cover, and under the banner of so-called “moderation and reform”, the Islamic Republic conducted one of the most extensive assassination campaigns of any modern state, murdering hundreds of dissidents and activists on foreign soil. Only a handful of cases ever saw a courtroom. None produced anything worthy of being called justice. The few that initially raised hope went on to become pawns in the West’s game of appeasement.
Among the many: the vicious slaying in Paris of Shapour Bakhtiar, Iran’s last prime minister before the fall of the monarchy; the slaughter in Bonn of Fereydoon Farrokhzad, Iran’s preeminent entertainer and activist; and the assassinations at the Mykonos Restaurant in Berlin, where several Kurdish opposition leaders were gunned down. These were among the repeated peaks in the Islamic regime’s ongoing atrocities inside Iran and abroad.
The list is long. Democratic governments, meanwhile, bent over backwards to normalize relations, rebuild trade, and “engage” the regime in a misguided doctrine of decoupling and compartmentalization, a smokescreen for furthering shortsighted economic interests. Zahra Kazemi’s case went nowhere with the Canadian government. Environmentalist and Canadian citizen Kavous Seyed-Emami died in an Iranian prison under suspicious circumstances. No one was held to account in any meaningful way.
This is how impunity settles in: slowly, case by case, until outrage is replaced by ritual statements and business as usual, until embedded apologists and operatives have become “domesticized” in democratic countries beyond recognition.
This logic has been formalized into what diplomats now call “hostage diplomacy”. When Sweden prosecuted former Iranian prison official Hamid Nouri for his role in the 1988 mass executions and sentenced him to life for crimes against international law, Tehran responded by seizing Swedish citizens, including EU diplomat Johan Floderus, and in June 2024 forced Stockholm into a swap that sent Nouri home in exchange for Floderus and another Swedish national, Saeed Azizi. Human rights groups rightly condemned it as a reward for hostage taking. Belgium did the same in 2023, trading Assadollah Assadi, an Iranian “diplomat” convicted for plotting a bomb attack against dissidents near Paris, for Belgian aid worker Olivier Vandecasteele, who had been arrested in Iran on fabricated charges. France now faces similar pressure over its own citizens held in Iran, while Russia has adopted a parallel model, exchanging Western hostages such as Brittney Griner and others for convicted arms traffickers and sanctioned agents. This unfortunate trend began in the early 1980s and shall continue because democratic countries have failed to find a solution. Each time democracies yield to this coercion, they secure one life at the cost of signalling that imprisoning innocent foreigners is an effective way to overturn convictions and launder state crimes.
If that pattern is to change, Western governments will have to stop treating state killings as unfortunate diplomatic complications and start treating them as non-negotiable crimes. No more “engagement” without open investigations, independent fact-finding, and visible legal consequences. Trade, diplomatic normalization, and high-level visits should be contingent on cooperation with international courts, disclosure of chains of command, and the prosecution or extradition of those who ordered and executed such crimes.
PS752: A Paradigm Shift
January 8, 2020 marks a turning point for justice in Iran and for Iranians.
That night, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) shot down a passenger aircraft only minutes after takeoff from Tehran’s main airport. Two missiles, fired twenty-five seconds apart, brought down Ukrainian International Airlines Flight PS752 barely six minutes after takeoff. Within three minutes and forty-two seconds after the second missile hit, the plane crashed near a football field on the outskirts of Tehran.
Five hours later, the crash site, left to looters and undercover operatives in the meantime, was bulldozed. What was not looted or confiscated was destroyed.
For three days, the Iranian regime and its network of supporters, operatives, and apologists denied any responsibility and declared it an aviation accident. Even after foreign governments confronted them with hard evidence, and the regime finally admitted that its IRGC air defense units had shot down the plane, it branded the act a “human error”.
The vulgarity, the crime, the lies, the denial, the shamelessness were not new. What was new was the response from the victims’ families. That response marked the beginning of a different kind of fight for justice among Iranians.
Families as Prosecutors, Not Petitioners
Fifty-five of the victims were Canadian citizens. More than eighty others had deep ties to Canada. Some university departments had to shut down research programs after losing key scientists on that flight. Many other victims lived across Europe.
The families organized quickly. They formed the Association of Families of Flight PS752 Victims, based in Canada but anchored in a global network of relatives and supporters. They focused their efforts on the governments of the affected countries and on international bodies.
Within weeks, they made one point unmistakably clear: their struggle was for truth, justice, and retribution, not for financial compensation or empty apologies.
In hindsight, the PS752 case represents a seismic shift that was already percolating in Iran’s sociopolitical landscape. For decades, survivors of state crimes were viciously oppressed in Iran, used as political pawns in partisan gamesmanship, or told by foreign states to be patient, to let governments “handle it”, or, in the PS752 case, to settle for compensation. The PS752 families refused that script, both inside and outside Iran. They insisted on truth and accountability in public, across borders, in courtrooms and international forums. By taking the initiative and challenging the status quo, they changed the grammar, vocabulary, and narrative of the international community when it comes to justice for the victims of state atrocities.
Firsthand Witness in the Eye of the Storm
I was in the eye of the storm surrounding the PS752 case. Initially, a few community leaders asked me to help the families while some of them were in Iran trying to repatriate the remains of their loved ones. As I came face to face with the victims’ families, that role turned into something that has consumed my life since that eighth of January in 2020.
Making the documentary 752 Is Not a Number (2022)was only one strand of that involvement. The film was secondary to the work itself: participating in an effort that helped shift the axis of Iranian activism away from symbolic protest and partisan posturing and toward concrete demands for truth, law, and accountability rooted in a non-ideological, grassroots movement bent on justice.
I began as part of the support system and then became the camera in the room, the fly on the wall with a responsibility to document, for posterity, how the survivors were treated as they fought for answers and struggled for the elusive closure they so badly deserved and never received.
From my firsthand, intimate vantage point, one thing became brutally clear: for these families, there can never be justice in the ordinary sense. Justice for them would mean their loved ones stepping off that plane, alive. No court, no verdict, no sentence can deliver that. It became evident to me that the pursuit of justice, the relentless effort to preserve the memory of the victims, and the deliberate infusion of the heinous crime that claimed their loved ones into the public consciousness are, together, the very essence of justice that remains available to them.
What they are doing is something harsher and more generous. By maintaining their dignity, by refusing to be bought off or silenced, by insisting on truth in the face of pressure, persecution, and fatigue, they are contributing, selflessly, to a larger, collective attempt to prevent repetition.
Justice as Prevention, Not Consolation
Standing shoulder to shoulder with the families, I too became a stakeholder, as I believe everyone in society should be.
True justice is not an after-the-fact ceremony. It is not revenge, or an apology, a payout, a memorial, or a diplomatic communiqué. In hindsight, it does not even end with something like the Nuremberg trials. It certainly is not an eye for an eye. True justice is the work of making it as hard as possible for the same crime to be committed again.
For that to happen, truth is non-negotiable. Justice without truth is not justice; it is public relations for the perpetrator. You cannot reconcile with a lie. You cannot forgive what the perpetrator will not even fully name. Truth is the unavoidable path toward justice.
For the survivors, the only “justice” left is to force the world to look, clearly and repeatedly, at what was done, by whom, and under what chain of command, and to push for real consequences. It is that very process of accountability that runs in the veins of a civilized, democratic society. The hope, if there is any, lies in reducing the chance that another set of families, in another country, will wake up to the same nightmare.
That hope will remain theoretical unless democracies align their own tools with their rhetoric. Visa bans and targeted sanctions mean little if they are quietly lifted in the next negotiation round. Arms sales, trade credits, and diplomatic upgrades should be conditioned on measurable steps toward accountability, not on promises of “reform”. Courts in Europe and North America that claim universal jurisdiction must be funded, staffed, and politically protected so that state crimes like PS752 can be prosecuted even when the regime that ordered them refuses to cooperate.
Justice, the Tentpole of Democracy
The murder of Mahsa Jina Amini led to a seismic shift in Iran’s political landscape that was years in the making and gave rise to the Woman, Life, Freedom movement. The promise of Iran’s Constitutional Revolution was hamstrung by partisan and ideological entanglement. Foreign powers played their part, but the corrosive bedrock was Islamism, which had tightened its grip on Iran for centuries, with Shiism finding its way deep into the centers of power since the Safavids. The 1979 revolution was the epitome of ideological contamination of Iran’s political discourse, suffocating attempts at democratization.
The families of Flight PS752 victims signaled a change in attitude that manifested itself broadly across Iran two years later. In their rejection of ideology and legacy partisan convulsions, Iranians demonstrated that justice, human rights, and democratic values have begun to replace ideologically tainted partisan aspirations.
For my part, I have tried to make good on that duty not only by joining the families in their fight with everything at my disposal, but by using my craft as a filmmaker to record, however partially, the reality they faced after the downing of PS752: the obstruction, the evasion, the humiliations, and their stubborn courage. It is a short, incomplete, and modest window into something much larger, but it is a record, an unfiltered, contemporaneous record for the future to behold and remember. We have a duty never to forget. To forgive, however, is the sole purview of the victims, on their terms.
Until the full truth is exposed, until those responsible are named and held to account in a meaningful way, and until victims are offered a genuine path to justice, any talk of “forgiveness” is not virtue. It is a dangerous fallacy, one that invites repetition and, in the end, will help doom us to relive our worst histories. Any notion of forgiveness, therefore, is meaningful only as the victims’ own seal of approval on justice they recognize as having been served.
Nuremberg was not only a trial of Nazi leaders. It was a test of whether victorious democracies were willing to bind themselves to the idea that some crimes are beyond politics. Since then, that principle has been invoked more often than it has been honored. Each time a regime shoots down a passenger jet, poisons an opponent abroad, or massacres protesters at home and still finds itself welcomed back to diplomatic summits, the legacy of Nuremberg is quietly hollowed out.
Today, in the face of rampant systemic corruption in Iran, brutal repression, and regional warmongering, the Iranian people seek to liberate themselves not only from the shackles of a nearly fifty-year-old Islamic-fascist state, but also from the demons of their more distant past. The Iran that emerges after Woman, Life, Freedom heralds a celebration of diversity as a fundamental feature of Iran’s national identity. But the transition that follows this seismic shift will not be easy. Iranians must carve their own path forward after ridding their country of the Islamic regime and the historic evil that it represents, and that path forward will be paved with justice: environmental justice, legal justice, ethnic justice, gender justice, economic justice.
Walking out of the theatre after watching Vanderbilt’s Nuremberg, I quickly overcame my urge to second-guess the filmmaker and focused instead on why making these kinds of films is necessary. In the journey I shared with the families of Flight PS752 victims, I learned that justice must not remain a mirage on an imaginary horizon drawn for us by systems designed to control and contain the masses. For the victims of atrocities, true justice may be no more than a mirage that keeps them going, but for the rest of us it is a tangible aspiration that makes us human. It becomes real when we make their loss our own and join them in their fight for justice so that injustice can no longer be inflicted on another.
This essay is part of an ongoing effort to engage in honest conversation about justice, memory, and Iran’s future. If you care about PS752 and what it represents, follow the work of the Association of Families of Flight PS752 Victims, and stay with this conversation.
Babak Payami – November 12, 2025