More than 400 people, including 15 women, have been executed in Iran this year alone, according to a panel of six special rapporteurs from the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, who are concerned about the increase in executions carried out in August, when Tehran authorities put to death at least 81 people, almost double the 45 killed in July.
“We are deeply concerned by this sharp increase in executions,” the report reads. published yesterday by experts commissioned by the UN High Commissioner. “According to the information received, of the 81 executions in August, only a fraction have been officially reported by the Islamic Republic of Iran, highlighting the urgent need for transparency.”
“Nearly half (41) of the executions were carried out for drug-related offences. The International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), to which Iran is a party, limits the application of the death penalty to the ‘most serious crimes’, meaning voluntary homicide,” the speakers in Tehran recalled. “Executions for drug-related offences violate international standards.”
But the experts’ doubts also concern the procedures that lead to death sentences. “Countries that retain the death penalty must ensure that individuals are not subjected to torture or cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment throughout the criminal justice process,” the rapporteurs emphasize. “Their right to a fair trial and equality before the law and the courts must be respected in all criminal proceedings.”
The UN has repeatedly called on Iran to impose a moratorium on executions, with the aim of finally abolishing the death penalty in the Islamic Republic. Several human rights associations accuse Tehran of using the death penalty as a tool of intimidation against protest movements I got off in the square in the last two years after the killing of Mahsa Amini, a girl of Kurdish origin arrested for not wearing the veil correctly and died in the custody of the Iranian authorities.
In their report, the six experts also cite the case of Reza Rasaei, a 34-year-old arrested during the protests that erupted in 2022 in Iran over the killing of Mahsa Amini and hanged on August 6 in Dizel Abad prison, the tenth protester killed since the beginning of the protests. “Based on a confession allegedly obtained under torture, Rasaei was sentenced to death for the murder of a member of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps while he was attending a ceremony for a musician of his faith Yarsani and brandishing signs that read: ‘Woman, Life, Freedom’”.
Iran’s Supreme Court, the speakers say, upheld his death sentence despite his co-defendants recanting their testimonies about Rasaei’s involvement in the murder and despite a medical examiner providing testimony casting doubt on his complicity.
“The reports of serious violations of due process and the right to a fair trial mean that the death penalty, as currently practiced in the Islamic Republic of Iran, amounts to an unlawful execution,” conclude the experts commissioned by the UN.
The case had led to a further dramatic development when the 2023 Nobel Peace Prize winner, Narges Mohammadi, imprisoned by Iranian authorities since November 2021, was beaten by guards of the women’s section of Evin prison in Tehran for participating in a protest against Rasaei’s execution.
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