At the least 901 folks have been reportedly executed in Iran final 12 months, together with about 40 in a single week in December, based on the UN human rights chief.
“It’s deeply disturbing that but once more we see a rise within the variety of folks subjected to the demise penalty in Iran year-on-year,” Volker Türk stated. “It’s excessive time Iran stemmed this ever-swelling tide of executions.”
The overall is the best recorded in 9 years and marks a 6% enhance from 2023, when 853 folks have been executed.
A lot of the executions have been for drug-related offences, however dissidents and folks linked to the 2022 protests have been additionally executed, based on the UN. There was additionally an increase within the variety of ladies executed.
Türk urged Iranian authorities to halt all additional executions and to put a moratorium on the usage of the demise penalty with a view to finally abolishing it.
“The demise penalty is incompatible with the elemental proper to life and raises the unacceptable danger of executing harmless folks. And, to be clear, it might by no means be imposed for conduct that’s protected beneath worldwide human rights legislation,” he warned.
A spokeswoman for the UN human rights workplace instructed reporters that its figures had come from a number of organisations which it thought-about dependable, together with Iran’s Human Rights Activists Information Company (HRANA), Iran Human Rights (IHR) and Hengaw.
On Monday, Norway-based IHR said in a report that in no less than 31 ladies have been executed throughout 2024 – the best quantity because it started monitoring the demise penalty 17 years in the past.
Nineteen of them have been sentenced to demise after being convicted of homicide, based on the report. They included, Leila Ghaemi, who IHR stated had strangled her husband after she got here dwelling sooner or later to seek out him and his associates raping her younger daughter.
The opposite 12 ladies have been convicted of drug-related offences. Amongst them was Parvin Mousavi, who IHR stated had been her household’s breadwinner and had been paid about €15 ($15.60) to move what she was instructed was drugs, however turned out to be 5kg of morphine.
Activists say medication offences don’t meet the edge of “most critical crimes” to which the demise penalty should be restricted beneath worldwide legislation,
A separate report from Hengaw, a Kurdish human rights group, stated that greater than half of these executed final 12 months have been from Iran’s ethnic minorities, together with 183 Kurds.
The UN’s fact-finding mission on Iran stated in August that ethnic and non secular minorities had been disproportionately impacted by the federal government’s crackdown on dissent since 2022, when the nationwide “Lady, Life, Freedom” protests erupted in response to the demise in custody of a younger Kurdish lady detained by morality police for not sporting a “correct” hijab.
HRANA, in the meantime, reported that it had documented the execution of 5 juvenile offenders. Worldwide legislation prohibits the usage of capital punishment in all circumstances by which the accused was beneath 18 on the time of their alleged offence.
Iran accounted for 74% of all recorded executions worldwide in 2023, based on the human rights group Amnesty Worldwide.
These figures excluded China, which Amnesty stated was thought to execute hundreds of individuals annually, however the place knowledge on the demise penalty was categorised.
