TEHRAN, July 20 — A park with a popular teahouse sits beside Evin Prison. Families bring children to play. Photographs of the detention facility itself are forbidden.
This juxtaposition—everyday life pressed against a place widely called Iran’s Bastille—has defined the Evin neighborhood for decades. The prison opened in 1972, under the last shah, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi.
After the 1979 Islamic Revolution, its purpose shifted entirely. It became the Islamic Republic’s most infamous detention center, a facility reserved primarily for political prisoners, journalists, academics, human rights activists, dual nationals, and foreign citizens the government accuses of espionage or propaganda. International human rights organizations have condemned Evin repeatedly.
Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, the UN Special Rapporteur, and Iranian human rights groups all document systematic abuses inside its walls. Reports describe beatings, electric shocks, mock executions, prolonged solitary confinement, forced confessions, sleep deprivation, and sexual abuse.
The prison holds separate blocks for common criminals and female inmates, and its grounds include both an execution yard and a courtroom.
Two cases that drew global attention
The mistreatment of scholar Mahvash Seydal became a symbol of the prison’s cruelty. According to human rights groups, she was deliberately denied medical care as punishment. The detention of Italian reporter Cecilia Sala also focused international scrutiny on the system.
These are not isolated incidents. They fit a pattern that activists and diplomats have denounced for years.
A fire, then an airstrike
In October 2022, a deadly fire swept through the facility. Chaotic conditions and authorities’ failure to protect detainees were exposed in the aftermath. The building itself, nestled at the foot of the Alborz mountains on land once owned by Ziaeddin Tabatabaee, a brief prime minister in the 1920s, proved difficult to secure or evacuate under pressure.
Then came June 23, 2025. Israeli airstrikes hit the prison compound.
The human toll was not limited to those incarcerated. According to Iranian media, activists, and human rights groups, the dead and injured included family members visiting prisoners, social workers, a lawyer, doctors and nurses, a 5-year-old child, teenage soldiers performing compulsory military service at the gates, administrative staff, and residents of the surrounding area. The prison sits in a residential and commercial district—there was no separation between the target and the neighborhood.
Five prisoners convicted of financial crimes died in the strikes. Authorities later confirmed that an insignificant number of inmates escaped.
Surviving political prisoners were moved to other facilities, raising questions about their safety and legal status in an already opaque system.
What the building holds
Evin is more than a detention center. It is a symbol of absolutist rule, a physical representation of the Islamic Republic’s intolerance of dissent. The structure itself—its execution yard, its separate wings, its location among shops and homes—tells a story about how power operates in Iran.
Photo restrictions around the prison are strictly enforced, a small but telling detail about the state’s sensitivity to outside scrutiny. For the families of those still detained, the airstrike did not end the ordeal.
It rearranged it. Prisoners were scattered to other facilities across the country. Contact, already difficult, became harder.
The organizations that have documented Evin’s abuses for years now face a new challenge: tracking where former Evin detainees have been sent, and under what conditions they are being held. What comes next depends on whether diplomatic pressure can reach the men and women who remain in custody—and whether a facility rebuilt or replaced will carry the same legacy of systematic abuse.
