When presenting to Parliament the candidates for cabinet positions for his new government, Iranian President Hassan Rouhani touted his pick for justice minister as a “moderate” even though he was designated as a human rights abuser by the European Union and participated in thousands of summary executions in the 1980s.

Rouhani, according Iran’s Mehr News agency, said that Seyyed Alireza Avaee was a “moderate during his post as Chief Justice of Tehran, calling on him to pursue human rights, citizenship rights, fighting corruption, and the legal and judicial issues of Iranians living abroad during his term as Minister of Justice.”

However, Avaee was sanctioned by the EU in 2011 for human rights violations including “arbitrary arrests, denials of prisoners’ rights and increase of executions” for the time he served as President of Tehran Judiciary.

Like the justice minister during Rouhani’s first term, Mostafa Pour-Mohammadi, Avaee has been implicated in his role in the thousands of summary executions carried out on the order of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the first Supreme Leader of the Islamic Republic of Iran.

Under Pour-Mohammadi, the rate of executions during Rouhani’s first three years in office soared. In 2015, Ahmed Shaheed, the United Nations investigator of human rights in Iran called the execution rate during Rouhani’s administration “an unprecedented assault on the right to life.” Pour-Mohammadi earned the nickname “minister of murder” for having overseen the summary executions of tens of thousands of dissidents in the late 1980s.

As the chief prosecutor at the Dezful prison during the mass executions, Avaee was a member of the death board that sentenced prisoners to death. Witnesses described him as one the most cruel executioners.

[Photo: PressTV News Videos / YouTube ]