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 ...

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...

Hidden from critical view: the disappeared of Cameroon

As the number of military personnel deployed to fight Boko Haram in the Far North Region of Cameroon has increased, the number of people detained without trial on suspicion of supporting the armed group has gone up, as well. Families and communities torn apart Since 2014, Cameroon’s security forces have arrested hundreds of people without charge during security operations. One man from the village of Double told us how security forces raided the village in search of suspected Boko Haram fighters: “Early in the morning, we heard gunshots and thought it was Boko Haram. We were scared and fled to the bush; then people called us to say it wasn’t Boko Haram, but the security forces, so we came back thinking we were safe. However, to our great surprise, those forces made us suffer even more than Boko Haram.” During this operation carried out in Double and in the neighbouring community, Magdeme, nine people were killed and more than 200 boys and men arbitrar...

Crumbs of human rights

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