ERBIL, Kurdistan Region - A body of United Nations experts on Friday urged Iranian authorities to immediately halt all executions, warning that Tehran is among the select few nations that still employs capital punishment and by far the “most prolific” per capita.
“Iran has seen too much death: lives lost to war and lives taken by their own State,” the experts said in a press release.
“Iran’s death penalty is used to silence dissent, with broadly defined national security offences recasting peaceful activity as a threat. That must change,” they said. “Iran’s own history shows that grievances left unaddressed resurface, however brutally they are repressed. Executions do not end dissent, but breed the next wave of it.”
Iranian forces have long used executions and public hangings as tools to quell protests and stifle public dissent, underscoring growing concerns among human rights organizations over the use of capital punishment.
In September alone, authorities executed at least 68 prisoners - two of which were carried out against protestors sentenced in January - including four women and four political prisoners, and two carried out in public, according to a report by Oslo-based Hengaw Organization for Human Rights based on cases it was able to verify utilizing sources on the ground.
According to a UN fact-finding mission, Iranian authorities used lethal force on an "unprecedented" scale to suppress nationwide anti-government January, in crackdowns it characterized as “beyond a simple continuation of familiar patterns.”
In a comprehensive report published in mid-September, Oslo-based Iran Human Rights (IHR) said it documented and cross-verified 4,219 individual deaths with full names, noting that over 3,356 of those victims were killed during the 48-hour climax on January 8 and 9 across all provinces.
“What happened cannot be undone, but what happens to those now facing execution lies entirely within the authorities’ control,” the press release read.
No one arrested over the protests should be executed, regardless of the accusations brought against them, the experts maintained.
“The cases brought to our attention are so riddled with procedural unfairness and underlying gross human rights violations, including torture, enforced disappearances, sexual violence, coerced confessions and denial of access to lawyers of their choosing, especially at the investigation stage, that this alone should rule out execution,” the experts said.
Experts named in the report included Mai Sato, the Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Islamic Republic of Iran, and eight others who “remain in contact with Iranian authorities on these cases.”
Special Rapporteurs, independent experts, and working groups are independent human rights experts appointed by the United Nations Human Rights Council. Together, these experts are referred to as the Special Procedures of the Human Rights Council.
The experts also noted offenses, such as consensual same-sex acts and religious offenses, such as apostasy, remain punishable by death.
Amnesty International records more than 100 “offenses” punishable by flogging under Iranian law covering a wide range of acts, ranging from theft, singing in public, assault, vandalism, defamation and notes young people under the age of 35 arrested for activities such as publicly eating during Ramadan, having relationships outside of marriage and attending mixed-gender parties, comprising the majority of those flogged.
“A moratorium would send a powerful message to the people of Iran: that the State’s use of lethal force can end, and that the country can move away from a system that has produced far too many arbitrary executions,” the experts concluded.
