Who Keeps This Record

The Iran Ledger is the public accountability record of the Middle East Forum’s Iran Accountability Project. It merges three research corpora into one deduplicated, provenance-tracked register: 959 public profiles, 905 designation events across five jurisdictions, a 68-name boycott and divestment screen, and the crackdown and post-MOU repression record that sits behind them.

The method, in one paragraph. Every claim is graded against a four-tier source standard and published only when it clears the gate: a Tier 1 to 3 source, or two independent Tier 4 outlets, or an individual re-verification against a primary source, dated. Four bodies of evidence (the crackdown, two rounds of war, and post-MOU repression) are never merged, summed or netted against one another. Where monitors disagree, the disagreement is published as a range rather than averaged into false precision. Where a claim rests on a single accepted-tier monitor, it is kept and attributed in prose rather than badged or buried. Material that has not cleared the gate is held, and only the count of held items is ever shown. The full statement of all of this is the Method page, and it governs every other page on this site.

A record at this scale will contain errors, and this one is built to be corrected in the open. To report one, write to info@meforum.org and cite the page and, where relevant, the profile id shown in the page URL. Corrections that change a published figure are made to the underlying data and carried through every page and download at the next build; the as-of date in the masthead of every page tells you which build you are reading.

Where this project has changed its mind about a classification rather than a fact; a name removed from the screen because a later pass found it already designated, for instance; the change is reported as a count and a reason, and the affected names are not published, because publishing them would undo the gate that removed them.

The Iran Ledger is funded by readers. Support this work at the Middle East Forum.

Press inquiries and interview requests go to info@meforum.org. Journalists working to a deadline should say so in the subject line. Every figure on this site is attributed to its own source, and those sources, not this site, are what should be cited for the underlying facts; the source register lists all 302 of them with their tier.

Quote it, cite it, reproduce the figures, and build on the data; with attribution to the Middle East Forum’s Iran Accountability Project and to the as-of date of the build you used. Where a figure on this site is itself attributed to a monitor or a government record, carry that attribution with it: the source, not this record, is the authority for the fact.

For bulk redistribution of the data, or to republish the screen as your own list, write to us first. The aim is not to restrict the use but to make sure corrections reach whoever is relying on it.

This site carries no advertising. Its one measurement tool is Google Analytics 4, which sets analytics cookies to count visits; fonts, images and page scripts all load from this domain. Some of the people this record is written for are inside Iran, so every page is built to work over a filtered or slow connection, and the record reads in full with JavaScript turned off.