Delara Darabi
Stop women and Juvenile execution
January 12, 2006 (Stop Fundamentalism) – According to Amnesty International, Delara Darabi, aged 19, is at risk of immanent execution for a murder which took place when she was 17 years old. She denies committing the crime.
According to reports in the Persian daily Aftab, Delara Darabi when she was 17 and a 19-year-old man named Amir Hossein broke into a woman’s house to commit a burglary. Amir Hossein allegedly killed the woman during the burglary. Delara Darabi initially confessed to the murder, but has since retracted her confession. She claims that Amir Hossein asked her to admit responsibility for the murder to protect him from execution, believing that as she was under the age of 18, she could not be sentenced to death.
As Amnesty International reports since 1990, Iran has executed at least 18 people for crimes committed when they were children. In 2005 alone, despite being urged in January by the United Nations 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. The last recorded execution of a child offender, Rostam Tajik, was on 10 December 2005 – ironically, the day which the UN has marked annually as Human Rights Day (see UA 306/05, MDE 13/075/2005, 06 December 2005, and follow-up).
