All the horrible practices employed by the regime of Iran, used to happen in western European countries as well:

- hostage politics: in medieval times, royal families of different kingdoms would exchange family members to live with the other royal family, as a form of hostage politics, supposedly this would prevent or discourage wars. The current regime in Iran rose to power how? by taking hostages. How have they repeatedly responded to spontaneous internal domestic forces towards regime change? Hostage politics. Every time they feel threatened they take hostages in some form or another: by taking a protestor hostage into some torture prison, they are keeping their relatives in line ("behave or your niece will have a bad day in infamous prison X"), it goes both ways they also keep the "free" relatives hostage by threatening say a protestor to harm their families if they don't pretend everything is fine. It's not just internal freedom of speech. I write from Belgium, when the protests surrounding Mahsa Amini's death occured, and the video of her collapse was released it even affected my freedom of speech: from the video it was clear they used hydrogen cyanide, but would I be allowed to share this on international media when "Free" nations are desperately trying to negotiate back their citizens taken hostage by the regime in Iran?

- The wrongs and mistakes made in say Europe during WW1 (lobbing chemicals at each other), were just repeated without learning lessons by Iran. They are a signatory to the chemical weapons ban treaty. Yet the Mahsa Amini video (which even aired on local Iranian national television) subtly leaks the information that she was killed with hydrogen cyanide.

There is no valid defense of the IRGC and the Iranian regime.