Hangings continue despite pleas

Tehran executes its sixth juvenile offender this year, defying treaties it has signed to end this practice.

Iran currently has 132 juvenile offenders in jail who are awaiting death sentences, according to Amnesty International, a human rights organisation.

After more than three lonely and agonising years on death row, Behnam Zarei, a 19-year-old Iranian, was led to the gallows and hanged behind the high walls of Adelabad prison in the southern city of Shiraz. He was put to death on Tuesday for killing a fellow teenager identified only as Mehrdad in a street fight in April 2005, according to a local press report.

Zarei's execution came despite repeated international pleas for Tehran to honour treaties it has signed banning the execution of those younger than 18 at the time of their crime. He was the second youth in days to be hanged for an offence committed as a child and the sixth such execution this year. "The situation of juvenile offenders facing execution in Iran has reached crisis levels," Amnesty International, the human rights organisation, warned as it condemned Zarei's hanging. There are "at least 132 juvenile offenders known to be on death row in Iran, although the true number could be much higher", Amnesty said.

Human Rights Watch (HRW), the New York-based organisation, said: "Iran leads the world in executing juvenile offenders. Everywhere else, countries are moving to end this abhorrent practice, but in Iran the numbers of death sentences seem to be increasing." Zarei, who was 15 at the time of his crime, had told the court the killing had been an accident, and he beseeched the victim's family for forgiveness. He was hanged "without the knowledge of his lawyer and family", Etemad-e-Melli, an Iranian daily reported.

Amnesty urged Iran to immediately stop sentencing juvenile offenders to death and to commute the sentences of those on death row. "No other country is known to have executed a juvenile offender in 2008," Amnesty said. HRW said since Jan 2005, Iran has executed at least 26 juvenile offenders, adding: "During the same period, only four other countries, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Yemen and Pakistan, are known to have executed any juvenile offenders, with a combined total of six executions in the four countries."

On Aug 19, Reza Hejazi, 20, was hanged in the central city of Isfahan: he was 15 in 2004 when he was among a group of people involved in a dispute that led to a man being fatally stabbed. He repeatedly told the authorities he had not intended to kill the victim, HRW said. Hejazi's hanging was "categorically condemned" by the European Union, which urged Iran "to consider an appropriate way of dealing with juvenile offenders, such as youth courts and sentences designed mainly to be education and facilitate their social rehabilitation".

Iran is the world's most prolific executioner after China, and the hangings are focusing damaging attention on Tehran's human rights record at a time when the Islamic Republic is facing isolation over its nuclear programme. Amnesty said so far this year 227 people have been executed in Iran compared to 317 for the whole of 2007. China, a far more populous country, carried out 470 death sentences last year.

Last month, on one day alone, Iran hanged 29 people convicted of crimes, including drug trafficking, murder and rape - it was the country's largest mass execution in years. International pressure appears to have had some impact. Iran last month renewed a six-year-old moratorium on stoning as a means of execution. It followed urgent appeals from local and international human rights activists to spare the lives of seven women and a man who were facing the penalty, mainly for adultery. Four of the sentences were commuted: two would receive lashes and two would be jailed for 10 years, judiciary officials said. The others had asked for forgiveness, and their requests were under review.

This year, Ayatollah Hashemi Shahroudi, the head of Iran's judiciary ordered an end to public executions, unless they had his special approval. He also outlawed the publication of pictures and broadcasting of video footage of executions. His orders followed a spate of grisly public executions last year where convicts were hauled aloft on construction cranes and hanged, with their bodies dangling before large crowds. The public hangings were widely covered by international media, provoking global condemnation.

But Iran has defied growing international pressure to end the execution of convicts who were younger than 18 at the time of the offence. Tehran is party to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the Convention on the Rights of the Child, which outlaw such executions. Iran has attempted to circumvent its commitments to these treaties by keeping minors on death row until they reach 18. Even so, in June Iran hanged a 17-year-old, Mohammad Hassandzadeh, in the western city of Sanandaj. He had been convicted of killing a 10-year-old boy two years earlier.

Ayatollah Shahroudi had advised the local court to settle Hassandzadeh's case "through reconciliation" with his victim's family, but no deal was reached. Under Iran's Islamic law, a victim's family can spare a murderer from execution by accepting "blood money", or financial compensation. The culprit then serves a prison sentence instead. Iranian rights activists often intercede to help broker such life-saving deals.

Capital offences in Iran include murder, rape, armed robbery, drug trafficking, adultery, treason and espionage. Human rights groups accuse Iran of resorting excessively to the death penalty, but Tehran counters that it is an effective deterrent used only after a thorough judicial process. Iran also accuses the West of hypocrisy, citing for example the abuses of detainees held by the US in Guantanamo Bay.

But Clarissa Bencomo, a researcher on children's rights in the Middle East for HRW, said: "Killing people for crimes committed as children provides neither justice nor safety for Iranian society." She added: "The Iranian authorities' willingness to lie to lawyers and to deprive families of a last chance to see their loved ones only underscores the depravity of these executions." @Email:[e-mail]