Fri 5 Aug 2016 In: International News View at Wayback View at NDHA
A teenage boy in Iran has been executed after he was convicted of the rape of another boy, during a trial in which he had no legal representation. Amnesty International reports that 19-year-old Hassan Afshar was hung on July 18 in Markazi Province after he was convicted in early 2015. The Office of the Head of the Judiciary had promised Afshar’s family that his case would be reviewed on 15 September 2016 however went ahead with the execution anyway. Afshar was arrested in December 2014 after he, along with two other youths, were accused of raping a teenage boy. Afshar maintained that this was consensual sex and that this wasn’t the first time the son of the complainant had engaged in sexual activity with someone of the same-sex. Amnesty International says that “rape does not fall into the category of offences for which the death penalty can be imposed under international law. “Furthermore, the existence of laws in Iran that criminalise consensual male to male sexual intercourse with the death penalty means that if the intercourse in this case had been deemed consensual, the teenager who accused Hassan Afshar of rape would himself have been sentenced to death. The criminalisation of same-sex sexual activity between consenting adults violates international human rights law.” “Iran has proved that its sickening enthusiasm for putting juveniles to death, in contravention of international law, knows no bounds. Hassan Afshar was a 17-year-old high school student when he was arrested. He had no access to a lawyer and the judiciary rushed through the investigation and prosecution, convicting and sentencing him to death within two months of his arrest as though they could not execute him quickly enough,” says Magdalena Mughrabi, Deputy Middle East and North Africa Programme Director at Amnesty International “In a cruel stroke of irony, officials did not inform Hassan Afshar of his death sentence for around seven months while he was held in a juvenile detention facility because they did not want to cause him distress – and yet astonishingly were still prepared to execute him. With this execution, Iranian authorities have demonstrated once again their callous disregard for human rights.” A second teenager, Alireza Tajiki was also scheduled to be executed. Tajiki was under 18 at the time he committed his alleged offence and public pressure has postponed his execution.
Credit: GayNZ.com Daily News staff
First published: Friday, 5th August 2016 - 9:36am