By RICK GLADSTONEJAN. 25, 2016 – New
York Times
Iran is
one of the leading executioners of juvenile offenders, despite its improved
legal protections for children and a pledge more than two decades ago to end
the death penalty for convicts younger than 18, Amnesty
International said Monday.
In a new report,
Amnesty International said that it had documented the execution of at least 73
juveniles in Iran from
2005 to 2015 and that 160 juvenile offenders are languishing on the country’s
death row.
The report casts
doubt on laws meant to improve children’s rights in Iran in the past few years,
including new discretion by judges to impose alternative punishments on
juveniles convicted of capital crimes. In reality, the report said, these
changes are attempts by the authorities to “whitewash their continuing
violations of children’s rights and deflect criticism of their appalling record
as one of the world’s last executioners of juvenile offenders.”
Amnesty
International, a leading global advocate for abolition of the death penalty, had
also recorded the execution of juveniles in Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Yemen,
and there are juveniles on death row in the Maldives and Nigeria.
There is little doubt
among rights groups that Iran has executed more people convicted of capital
crimes committed as minors than any other country.
“Iran is almost
certainly the world leader in executing juvenile offenders,” Michael G.
Bochenek, senior counsel of the children’s rights division at Human Rights
Watch, said in a post on
its website in April.
Amnesty International
has released its report as a United Nations committee is reviewing compliance
with the Convention of the Rights of the Child. In
1994, Iran ratified that treaty, which prohibits capital punishment and life
imprisonment without the possibility of release for offenses committed by
people younger than 18.
“This report sheds
light on Iran’s shameful disregard for the rights of children,” Said
Boumedouha, deputy director of Amnesty International’s Middle East and North
Africa Program, said in a statement released with the report. “Despite some
juvenile justice reforms, Iran continues to lag behind the rest of the world,
maintaining laws that permit girls as young as 9 and boys as young as 15 to be
sentenced to death.”
There was no
immediate comment from Iranian officials on the Amnesty International report.
Requests for a response from Iran’s mission to the United Nations in New York
were not returned. The Iranian judicial authorities have previously sought to
impugn reporting by Amnesty International about Iran’s use of the death penalty
as biased and lacking credibility.
Elise Auerbach, an
Iran specialist in Amnesty International’s United States branch, said Iran had
in the past sought to sidestep criticism of its juvenile death-penalty
practices by saying that offenders were not executed until after they had
reached adulthood.
“They have executed
juvenile offenders,” she said. “If the person commits a crime at age 15 and is
not executed until age 21, they’re still executed as juvenile offenders.”
Ms. Auerbach said the
report, written by researchers at Amnesty International’s headquarters in
London, was based on information received from death-penalty opponents and
human rights defenders in Iran, as well as from lawyers and relatives of
juveniles convicted of capital crimes in Iran.
Now that Iran is
emerging from an era of international sanctions and is seeking broader
acceptance, Ms. Auerbach said, rights groups are hoping that the Iranian
authorities “realize they have to act in accordance with international human
rights standards.”
For years, Iran has ranked among the
world’s top executioners. In July,
Amnesty International said the Iranian authorities were
believed to have executed 694 people in the first seven months of 2015, the
equivalent of more than three people a day.
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