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/)

Updated version: Mohammad Ali Taheri ENDED his hunger strike says his family

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Executing juveniles is strictly prohibited by international law

In the past month, Amnesty issued several updates on juvenile offenders, who were about to face the gallows. Because of that, names like Salar Shadizadi, Saman Naseem, Alireza Shahi or Milad Azimi might all sound familiar to you – unfortunately. There have been some good news and some bad news, as well. As of the good, the execution of Salar Shadizadi has been postponed. This is to allow the murder victim’s family to pardon him. However, Salar remains at risk. The authorities should grant him a fair retrial, making sure that there will not be a recourse to the death penalty. As of the bad news: sadly, Alireza Shahi , a 25-year-old man was executed in the morning of 24 November 2015. By now, Saman Naseem has become a person, whose fate we have been following closely. In this year’s Write for Rights campaign, you might already have signed a card for him or you might do so with your local group within the next days. Amnesty International is asking the Iranian regime to grant

Crumbs of human rights

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