Tehran, 21 March, 2008 (AKI) - As Iran celebrated the ancient Persian festival of Norouz to mark the new year, activists reflected on the poor state of human rights in Iran and the high number of executions in the past 12 months.
Mohammad Seifzadeh, an Iranian lawyer who chairs the League of Defenders of Human Rights says more than 300 executions were carried out in the past year.
Student Ebrahim Lotfollahi and Zahra Baniyaghoub, a medical graduate, were found dead in their prison cells, a few hours after being arrested by agents from the intelligence ministry.
According to Zahra’s family, the young woman had been raped in prison and killed. She had been arrested in a park with her boyfriend for allegedly committing obscene acts in a public place. Lotfollahi, a student activist , was believed to have died during her interrogation.
One man, Jafar Kiani, had instead been stoned to death after being accused of cohabitating with Mokarrameh Ebrahimi, freed this week after 11 years in prison.
Human rights activists also expressed concern about the high number of adolescents condemned to death.
“After signing all the international conventions on the subject, Iranian judges are condemning young people of 14 and 15 years to death, and then waiting for them to reach the age of 18 to execute them,” said Seifzadeh.
There are at least 70 young people on death row who at the time of their arrest were under the age of 16. Makwan Moloudzadeh, arrested at age 17 for allegedly having homosexual relations at 13, was hanged last December before reaching his 18th birthday.
In the past 12 months, Iranian organisations claim that 80 feminists have been arrested and 20 of them have been sentenced from three to five years in jail.
A total of 54 journalists have ended up in prison, several were released without trial after serving jail time, while others remain behind bars.
In the past 12 months, 34 newspapers and magazines, among them the feminist magazine Zanan, have been shut down.
A new law that foreshadows the death penalty for those with a Muslim father who convert to other faiths, offers little hope to human rights activists.
The law is expected to be approved by the new parliament within the next month and could affect an estimated one million Iranians who in the past ten years abandoned Islam to embrace other religions.
What we have said here is only a brief listing of academic violations and denial of right to education in Iranian universities today. Students are determined to continue their legal and rightful struggle to promote independence of universities and uphold academic freedoms, although many are sacrificed down this path.
Iran is a state party to both the International Convention on Civil and Political Rights (without reservation) and the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC), both of which prohibit the execution of persons under the age of 18 at the time of their offense. In ratifying the CRC, Iran declared an extremely broad reservation, “not to apply any provisions or articles of the Convention that are incompatible with Islamic Laws.”
one must not forget that one aspect of “security” cases is the image that they carry for the groups that advance such issues. Therefore, before fake charges take to the news-media and become public, those who have had a hand in arresting the students must be weakened. Otherwise, after the severe charges are made public, repeated and are tied to the image of the actors, even the intervention of the head of the judiciary (as history demonstrates) cannot be of much help to the detainees.
How can we tell the judiciary officials of Iran that according to law juveniles can stay alive and continue to live with appropriate and suitable punishment? How must one make this request from the judiciary a public and wide-spread demand and point out that killing a juvenile who has not wholeheartedly committed an act does not solve any of the real problems facing the country?
Thousands of university students in an Iranian city have held a protest against the attempted sexual harassment of a female colleague by a top university official, the press reported on Monday. About 3,000 students at the university in the northwestern city of Zanjan staged the sit-in protest over the weekend at a sports hall on campus, the reports said.
