Don’t die hard. Don’t die young.

An ideal solution for the regime to increase the number of the population would be: Not to sacrifice more lives. Amnesty International has received reports of more than 700 executions so far this year.

Having a look at the numbers of juvenile offenders, it shows that 75 executions took place between 2005 and 2015. This year itself, at least three juvenile offenders have faced the death penalty. More than 160 are believed to be currently on death row in prisons across the country.

Fatemeh Salbehi was one of the recent cases. The 23-year-old woman was hanged on 13 October for a crime she allegedly committed when she was 17. She had been sentenced to death in May 2010 for the murder of her 30-year-old husband. She had been forced to marry Hamed Sadeghi at the age of 16.

A few days earlier, Samad Zahabi had been hanged for shooting a fellow shepherd during a row over who should graze their sheep. He committed this, when he was 17. Samad had been sentenced to death by the Provincial Criminal Court of Kermanshah Province in March 2013. This happened, even though he had said both during the investigations and at the trial that the shooting was unintentional and in self-defence, and resulted from a fight that he was drawn in against his will.

Mentioning juvenile offenders, Amnesty has recently been informed that Saman Naseem was returned to Oroumieh Central Prison. He had been held there before his enforced disappearance. He will be retried by a criminal court in Oroumieh, but the date of his trial has not been decided yet.

These facts and figures are very alarming and shout for urgent changes. Of note, Iran is scheduled to be reviewed by the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child (CRC) in January 2016.

Acknowledged executions in Iran and its neighbours in 2014

(Datasource: https://www.amnesty.org/en/what-we-do/death-penalty/)

Is sharing a joke enough reason to jail someone?

Fomusoh Ivo Feh, a 29-year old Cameroonian student was about to start university when he was arrested by six plain-clothes men in the South-West region of Cameroon on 13 December 2014. His arrest followed a sarcastic SMS message that he sent to a friend , Azah Levis Gob who also shared it with his friend, Afuh Nivelle Nfor, a secondary-school student. The SMS was sent as a joke about how difficult it is getting into university or finding a good job without being highly qualified in Cameroon – suggesting it was easier to get into Boko Haram. The message read: ‘Boko Haram recruits young people from 14 years-old and above. Conditions for recruitment: 4 subjects at GCE, plus religion.’ After a teacher saw the message on Afuh Nivelle Nfor’s phone and showed it to the police, Ivo and his friends were arrested in late 2014. Subsequently, all three were charged with several offences, including attempting to organise a rebellion. A military court in Yaoundé sentenced Ivo and his ...

Are you sure that your laptop is “child-labour-free”?

You can’t entirely be. If you search on the internet, you will probably find that the lithium-ion battery, the thing that powers your laptop, tablet or smartphone and enables you to surf for hours, contains cobalt. If you search a little longer, you’ll learn that 50% of this mineral comes from the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) – mined in the south of the country, often by children and for very little money. Kids work in mines under dangerous conditions Children, as young as seven are involved in this dirty industry. According to a UNICEF report from 2014, approximately 40,000 boys and girls work in the mines across the southern part of the DRC, many of them involved in cobalt mining. The majority of the kids work above ground, collecting minerals from the mountains of tailings (or residue) outside both active and inactive industrial mines. They can also work in lakes and streams close to the mines, washing and sorting the stones. Some boys go underground, digging deep to a...

The ideology of Boko Haram and the Islamic State

Boko Haram had announced the group's pledge of allegiance to the Islamic State on 7 March 2015, therewith aligning itself with the IS in the global Jihadist movement. The IS welcomed the news and promptly accepted a pledge of allegiance to the group , according to an audiotape purportedly from its spokesman. "We announce to you to the good news of the expansion of the caliphate to West Africa because the caliph... has accepted the allegiance of our brothers [..]” – IS spokesman Mohammed al-Adnani said in the message. However, this video appearing on IS-affiliated websites could not be authenticated. Although the nature of exact links between the two armed groups are still unclear, it can be confirmed that their ideologies and operations show similarities, despite some remaining differences. (Source: www.dw.com) The ideology of the two armed groups The ideology of both groups is based on a premodern theological tradition that wants the establishment o...

Crumbs of human rights

Search This Blog