Asia-Pacific, Crime & Justice, Headlines, Human Rights, Middle East & North Africa

DEATH PENALTY-IRAN: Condemned for Being Different

Alberto Cremonesi

NEW YORK, Jul 28 2006 (IPS) - Say we go back one year, to Jul. 19, 2005. Say we move from New York to Mashad, a city in northeastern Iran. There, one year ago, two teenagers named Ayaz Marhoni and Mahmoud Asgari were put to death for a crime involving homosexual intercourse, after being detained for 14 months and tortured with lashing.

The sentence, pronounced by the Iranian Supreme Court, was carried out by public hanging. Asgari, the younger of the two, was reportedly underage at the time he was jailed.

Whether the two teenagers were sentenced and executed for having engaged in sexual acts with each other or for the rape, along with several other participants, of an unidentified 13-year-old boy, activists say one certainty remains: Iran has continually violated the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which prohibit the execution of minors and to which Iran is a party.

The government of Iran insists that it does not execute minors, but according to Amnesty International, the facts tell a different story.

Since 1990, Iran has executed at least 19 people for crimes committed when they were children, despite the Convention on the Rights of Child which ask not to execute anyone for an offence committed when under the age of 18.

In 2005 alone, despite being urged by the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child to suspend the practice immediately, at least eight child offenders were executed, including two who were still under 18 at the time of their execution. And the practice of executing people for crimes committed while juvenile remains common in Iran.

Of course Iran is not the only state that perpetrates the most inhumane form of punishment. Last year, there were 2,148 known executions worldwide, and 94 percent of them took place in China, Iran, Saudi Arabia and the United States.

To commemorate the date of the first anniversary of the execution of the two teenagers in Iran, several human rights organisations and gay and lesbian activists have called for protection of human rights in the country, organising vigils and forums on the topic of the death penalty as a form of discrimination against minorities and the poor.

“There is no question about abuses suffered by gay and lesbian people in Iran,” Paula Ettelbrick, executive director of the International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission (IGLHRC), said at a recent meeting in New York held at the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual & Transgender Community Centre.

“The death penalty is universally recognised as a human rights violation. We must reach and ensure long-lasting human changes,” she said.

In Iran, the situation of the gay and lesbian community is particularly difficult. Most of the time, the gay issue is portrayed as part of the conflict between Western secular humanism and Islamic fundamentalism. According to the Persian Gay & Lesbian Organisation (PGL) and Outrage, up to 4,000 lesbians and gay men may have been executed since the Iranian revolution in 1979.

“The way we understand being gay and lesbian in our culture does not mean that it is perceived the same in other cultures,” said Hossein Alizadeh, communications coordinator of IGLHRC and a native of Iran.

One consensus that emerged from the round of talks is that local coalitions and organisations fighting the death penalty and other discrimination are more efficient than global movements. As highlighted by Hadi Ghaemi, Iran researcher for Human Right Watch (HRW), “Iran is a dynamic country. The tendency to bring about peaceful changes is coming from inside, from Iranian people. International organisations are not allowed into the country, we must rely on people from inside.”

Indeed, external help is often seen as something dangerous.

“Manifestations from outside raise hysterics in Iran. The U.S. in particular is seen as evil, it is not trusted nor liked. This is the kind of ignorance that hurts other people,” said Kouross Esmaeli at the meeting, an Iranian-American filmmaker and activist.

In this complicated situation it is difficult to figure out which could be the next step towards a more comprehensive human rights protection. “There is an effort now to reform some of the forms of punishment in Iran, including the death penalty. However, this legal crisis makes the situation very difficult for democracy in Iran,” Scott Long, Director of the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Program of Human Rights Watch, told IPS.

According to Amnesty International, Iran is one of the most frequent executioners. Only last year the Islamic country is known to have executed at least 94 people. The Islamic law, called Shariah, allows for execution as punishment for sexual crimes like rape and human rights groups have documented numerous cases in which Iran has executed its citizens on charge of sodomy and adultery. According to the Persian Gay and Lesbian Organisation, it is obvious that the Iranian government does not recognise gay rights.

At the time of the execution of the two adolescents, Human Rights Watch expressed concern that interest in the case from gay organisations and some media was only a way to make use of the episode for other ideological purposes. However, whether the death penalty was used as a form of discrimination of homosexual rights or not, Iran violated specific human rights obligations, contravening articles contained in the two treaties of which the country is signatory.

“My hope is that the struggle of the gay and lesbian community will become part of the democratic struggle in Iran, I think this is the crucial part of the debate. Defending the right to privacy for everyone, defending the right not to be tortured, eliminating the death penalty… this is part of the issues that affect Iran,” Long told IPS.

This month, rallies and vigils took place worldwide, from San Francisco to Buenos Aires, Mexico City, Toronto, Moscow, Brussels, Vienna, Dublin, London, Berlin and many other cities to commemorate the anniversary of the death of the two young Iranian men and to call attention on human rights violations that take place globally every day.