Iran: juvenile executions must be stopped

Fear of imminent mass executions of juvenile offenders

Seven juvenile offenders are planned to be executed by Iranian regime

The Iranian regime in yet another brutal measure has transferred 7 

juvenile offender to the solitary confinement for imminent execution.

As a step prior to carrying out executions, the fundamentalist regime of Iran moves the death row inmates to the solitary confinement a day or days before the sentence is carried out. The 7 are in what is called by Iranian people as Gohardasht prison or as it is called by the regime the Rajaie-shahr prison located some 20 miles northwest of Tehran in the city of Karaj. 

The young inmates were transferred earlier on Saturday from the prison’s Ward 5, known as the adolescents’ ward, to solitary confinement in Gohardasht Prison in Karaj, north-west of Tehran. Reports say the regime plans to execute them at the latest by next Wednesday.

All seven inmates are believed to be between the ages of 22 and 25 and some are suspected to have been minors at the time of their alleged crime.

The names of six of the prisoners are believed to be Mohsen Agha-Mohammadi, Farhad Bakhshayesh, Iman Fatemi-Pour, Javad Khorsandi, Hossein Mohammadi and Masoud Raghadi.

The mullahs’ regime on Friday hanged a man in a prison in Qazvin, north-west of Tehran.

Ismaeil Sadeqi Niaraki, a notorious mullah who is the regime’s Prosecutor in Qazvin, confirmed the execution had taken place in the city’s central prison. He identified the victim only by his first name Sepahdar.

Iran’s fundamentalist regime has sharply increased its rate of executions, carrying out at least 21 hangings in a 48-hour period earlier this week.

Ms. Farideh Karimi, a member of the National Council of Resistance of Iran ( NCRI ) and a human rights activist, on Tuesday criticized the lack of response by the international community and human rights groups to the appalling state of human rights in Iran.

The latest hanging brings to at least 98 the number of people executed in Iran since April 10. Three of those executed were women and one is believed to have been a juvenile offender.

Iran’s fundamentalist regime last week amputated the fingers of a man in his thirties in Mashhad, the latest in a line of draconian punishments handed down and carried out in recent weeks.

The National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI) said in a statement on April 13 that the increasing trend of executions “aimed at intensifying the climate of terror to rein in expanding protests by various strata of the society, especially at a time of visits by high-ranking European officials, demonstrates that the claim of moderation is nothing but an illusion for this medieval regime.”

Amnesty International in its April 6 annual Death Penalty report covering the 2015 period wrote: 'Iran put at least 977 people to death in 2015, compared to at least 743 the year before.'

'Iran alone accounted for 82% of all executions recorded' in the Middle East and North Africa, the human rights group said.

There have been more than 2,300 executions during Hassan Rouhani’s tenure as President. The United Nations Special Rapporteur on the human rights situation in Iran in March announced that the number of executions in Iran in 2015 was greater than any year in the last 25 years. Rouhani has explicitly endorsed the executions as examples of “God’s commandments” and “laws of the parliament that belong to the people.”