Human Rights Groups call on Iran to stop the execution of political prisoners

Saman Naseem, an Iranian-Kurdish man was arrested at the mere age of seventeen; he underwent false trials where he was prosecuted on the charges of “enmity with God” and “Corruption on Earth”. 

He was sentenced to death by these sham Mullah Courts and the decision was upheld by the regimes supreme courts in 2014. Catherine Ray the EU spokesperson for foreign affairs urged the Iranian authorities not to execute Saman. Mrs Ray said, “We call on the Iranian authorities to abide by international human rights law, under which the execution of juvenile offenders is a violation of international minimum standards, and not to carry out the execution of Mr Naseem or any other juvenile offender.”

Other representatives of the United Nations who are human rights experts urged the Iranian Mullah regime to reconsider its sentence and to comply with the human rights obligations and immediately halt the planned execution of the juvenile offender.

“Regardless of the circumstances and nature of the crime, the execution of juvenile offenders is clearly prohibited by international human rights law,” Ahmed Shaheed, Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in Iran, and Christof Heyns, the UN Special Rapporteur on extrajudicial executions, declared in a press release.

Saman was being held in the central prison of the northwestern city of Orumiyeh alongside five other political prisoners and they were transferred to solitary cells on Wednesday. The names of the other prisoners are Yones Aghat, Habiballah Afshari, Ali Afshari, Sirvan Nezhavi, and Ibrahim Shapoori.

Habiballah Afshari and his brother Ali Afshari were executed on Thursday, There has been conflicting reports on the execution of Saman Naseem on the same day.

According to Amnesty International Saman was beaten and tortured to make a forced confession on tape which was aired on TV. “Saman Naseem was allowed no access to his lawyer during early investigations and he said he was tortured, which included the removal of his finger and toe nails and being hung upside down for several hours,” an Amnesty statement said. 

“Saman Naseem called his family on 15 February and told them that earlier that day men in plain clothes had taken him to the security department of the Oroumieh Prison. He said the men, who he believed belonged to the Ministry of Intelligence and were carrying cameras and recording equipment, beat him for several hours to force him into making video-taped ‘confessions’, but he refused to do so.”

This is the reality of Iran and the Mullah Regime that governs it, injustice and tragedy. How many others suffer injustice at the hands of this farce of a judicial system where if someone cannot be convicted of a crime he is labeled and accused of crimes against God and the Earth and is given the harshest of judgments, death.