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/)

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