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 Saman a fair trial.

However, it seems that Iran does not want to give up on its notoriety for topping the global table for executing juvenile offenders.

This is also illustrated in the latest news: Iran re-sentenced two young men to death for crimes committed when they were under 18 years old. This happened after their retrials concluded that they had reached “mental maturity” at the time of the crime.

Sajad Sanjari was first sentenced to death in January 2012 after being convicted of murder for fatally stabbing a man in Kermanshah Province when he was 15. He is now 20 years old.

Hamid Ahmadi, now aged 24, was first sent to the death row in August 2009 in connection with the fatal stabbing of a young man. This had happened during a fight between five boys in northern Gilan Province. Hamid was 17 years old at the time.

In this year alone, Iran is believed to have executed at least four juvenile offenders, but this number is likely to be higher.

Shamefully, Iran is going to appear at the next session of Committee on the Rights of the Child very soon (on 11 and 12 January 2016). Knowing about the above mentioned cases, the Committee might raise further concerns about Iran’s cruel practice of putting juvenile offenders to death.

>>TAKE ACTION! Send a card to Saman Naseem and write an appeal letter to the authorities regarding Salar Shadizadi and Sajad Sanjari.

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The Cameroonian security forces don't take into account how many lives they sacrifice when it comes to eradicating the Islamist group, Boko Haram. Amnesty International revealed in its new report that t he military offensive against Boko Haram has resulted in widespread human rights violations against civilians in the Far North region of the country. During search-and-cordon operations, security forces often arrest people on the basis of very little information or assumptions and sometimes they detain whole groups. In February 2015 for example, in Kossa, 32 men were arrested based on accusations that the village was providing food to Boko Haram. Most were later released, but one man died in custody. After being arrested, people are far too often held incommunicado at illegal detention sites in military bases, before being transferred to the official prisons. And, as Amnesty International learnt, in secret detention, torture is not a rare method to encoura...

Crumbs of human rights

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