Rights advocates renew calls on Iran to stop child execution

Amir Amrollahi didn't have murder in mind when he got involved in a street fight on his way to a bakery in his hometown of Shiraz, his father says.

But the then 16-year-old Amir stabbed another teenager to death and has spent the past three years in jail waiting to be taken to the gallows at any moment.

"He was a good student. He intervened to stop the fight," Bahman Amrollahi said of his son at a Tuesday news conference on child execution organised by the rights group of Nobel peace laureate Shirin Ebadi.

"I beg the victim's family, now that the law does not forgive, to have mercy on my child," he said, weeping as he recounts his son's suicide attempts in jail.

For years, Ebadi and many other rights advocates have urged Iran to heed its commitment to international conventions on child rights and stop executing offenders for crimes they committed under the age of 18.

Rights groups say there are at least 70 such convicts on death row across Iran, and that 17 have been executed in the past 18 months.

Among others on death row is 24-year-old Abumoslem Sohrabi, a nomad from Fars province. He was convicted of killing, at the age of 17, a man who had repeatedly raped him in the past and was harassing him.

His lawyer's request for a retrial has failed.

Lawyer Mohammad Mostafai, who has handled 30 such cases in the past, said none of his clients had an intention to kill when they committed the crime.

But he said Iran's law makes it hard to differentiate between manslaughter and murder, imposing the maximum punishment for accidentally killing someone in a street fight.

Several crimes including murder, drug trafficking and rape, are punishable by death under the Sharia-based law practised in Iran following the 1979 Islamic revoluion.

Last month, the Iranian judiciary said minors convicted of drug trafficking could face a maximum term of life imprisonment rather than death but that those found guilty of murder could still face execution.

The judiciary says it does not execute minor offenders while they are under 18 but rights activist Asieh Amini said nine such executions have taken place in the past 2 decades.

The judiciary insists retribution in murder is a private right and that is up to the victims' families to determine whether the death sentence should be carried out.

Under Iranian law, a murder victim's family can spare a convict's life by accepting blood money. Some families have also been known to forgive a murderer without demanding compensation.

"Unfortunately our legal system is vengeful rather than corrective," lawyer Nasrin Sotoodeh said, complaining that demands to abolish minor executions have been met with accusations of being "pro-West and non-Muslim."

"We ask our government to stop child execution; it does not matter what names it calls us," she said.

Rights campaigner Khadijeh Moghaddam has been pleading with victims' families to forgive women and child murderers for years. Recently a family threatened to hurt her if she continued to interfere.

She said in some cases minors had been duped by adults into claiming a murder they had not committed believing that minors will not be executed.

Many of the convicts are poor, making it hard to to raise the blood money, which is officially set at 55,000 dollars although some families demand more, Moghaddam said.

Rights advocates have sought to raise the age of legal responsibility in Iran, which deems a boy punishable from the age of 15 and a girl from nine, though an Iranian cannot drive, claim his inheritance or vote before 18.

Ebadi dismissed criticism about the bid to stop child execution as being un-Islamic, citing Iran's previous criminal law adopted more than 80 years ago and rubber-stamped by prominent clerics at the parliament then.

She said the 1925 law banned execution for under 18 offenders and gave them a maximum of five years in jail.

"We are not copying the West," she said. "Just take us back to 80 years ago."

Source: Agence France-Presse, November 26, 2008