As the World Day against Death Penalty approaches, the Human Rights House of Iran has launched its “Anti-Death Penalty Committee”

The Anti-Death Penalty Committee of the Human Rights House of Iran has been established in order to record and prepare statistical reports on execution of death penalties and punishments which lead to an individual’s death and to follow-up on the condition of death row prisoners.

On the website of the Anti-Death Penalty Committee, all the instances where death penalty has been carried out have been collected from official and unofficial sources. The statistics will be gathered based on the location where the penalty was carried out, the crimes for which the execution took place, gender and age of the executed individuals, and the date and the location where the execution occurred, on a monthly basis.

Islamic Republic of Iran is a country with one of the highest rates of executions in the world. Iran has the second highest execution rate in the world, second to China and has the highest execution rate in the world based on population.

At the beginning of the current year, the World Congress against Death Penalty proposed the abolishment of death penalty all over the world within the next 5 years. In the past 40 years, the percentage of countries which have abolished death penalty has risen from 20% to 70%. One hundred and thirty seven countries have abolished death penalty and Iran is among the 60 countries which still carry out executions.

The United Nations adopted the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights in 1966. The covenant strongly suggests that all countries which are UN members shall abolish death penalty or at least restrict its application to the most serious crimes. Article 6 of the Covenant states that its standards shall not postpone or prohibit death penalty. However, the Convention against Torture and several other covenants abolish torture and cruel and inhumane punishments.

Many standards have been set in several international covenants and treaties for death penalty such as “providing death row inmates with appropriate prison conditions, setting proper time period between court sentencing and the execution of the sentence which allows for the appeals process, postponement of the execution while appeals or request for amnesty are pending, informing the relatives of the death row inmate, prohibition of public executions, preparation of accurate statistical reports and abolition of death penalty for children under 18.”

The Islamic Republic of Iran undermines all the aforementioned standards and carries out the execution sentences suddenly, without informing the families and the lawyers, carries out public executions, executes children under 18 and fails to provide a statistical report.

It is even more unfortunate that many executions in Iran take place for political reasons. In these cases, the execution does not take place for a crime committed, has political motives behind it and is aimed at satisfying the political goals. One example is the execution of Arash Rahmanipour who was arrested before the disputed presidential elections but was executed after the 2009 elections and in connection to the post-election protests.

The aforementioned factors persuade us in the Human Rights House of Iran to collect and to record the information on execution in Iran and to offer our support to death row inmates. As previously stated, one of the standards requires providing accurate statistical reports on executions and the irresponsible government of the Islamic Republic of Iran has failed to do so.

In the Anti-Death Penalty Committee of the Human Rights House of Iran, we aim to prepare a complete statistical report on the executions based on official and unofficial reports even though they do not include all the instances where death penalty has been carried out.

It is important to note that all the statistics prepared in this site relate to the executions since the beginning of the Iranian New Year (March 21, 2011) and have been collected from official sources. The part for unofficial statistics has not been completed yet and will be prepared in the upcoming days.

Mojtaba Sameinejad

Secretary of the Human Rights House of Iran

Persian Article: http://www.rahana.org/archives/45092