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Iran: The death penalty is an inhumane punishment for death row prisoners, their families and society as a whole

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"Whether guilty or not, the outcome of the death penalty is the same. In Iran, the death penalty is by hanging, and it takes from several agonising seconds to several harrowing minutes for death to occur and for everything to be over."

Every year several hundred people are executed by the Iranian authorities.
According to reports by Iran Human Rights (IHR) and other human rights groups, death row prisoners have often no access to a defence lawyer after their arrest and are sentenced to death following unfair trials and based on confessions extracted from them under torture. 
These are issues which have been addressed in IHR’s previous reports. The current report is based on first-hand accounts of several inmates held in Iran's prisons and their families. The report seeks to illustrate other aspects of how the death penalty affects the inmate, their families and, as a consequence, society.
How does a death row inmate experience his final hours?
Speaking about the final ho…

Iran: Two Executions in Urmia

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Public execution in Iran
Iran Human Rights (Jul 4, 2018): Two prisoners were executed at Urmia Central Prison.

According to close sources, on the morning of Wednesday, July 4, two prisoners, sentenced to Qisas, were executed at Urmia central Prison. 

It should be noted that three prisoners were scheduled to be executed today, but one of them was able to win the consent of the plaintiffs at the last moment.

The execution of these prisoners has not been announced by the state-run media so far.

According to Iran Human Rights annual report on the death penalty, 240 of the 517 execution sentences in 2017 were implemented due to murder charges. 

There is a lack of a classification of murder by degree in Iran which results in issuing a death sentence for any kind of murder regardless of intensity and intent.

Considering the fact that the number of drug-related executions has been reduced in recent months due to the enforcement of the new drug law in 2018, most of the executed prisoners were those sentenced to Qisas (retribution in kind). 

Source: Iran Human Rights, July 5, 2018


Iran reduces death penalty, life sentence against 1700 drug convicts


Abbas Jafari-Dolatabadi, the Tehran prosecutor general, announced on Tuesday that 1,700 sentences of narcotic-related cases have been commuted from capital punishment and life sentence to less severe forms of punishment.

The change in the law on narcotics-related punishments have revolutionized the country's policies in fighting against narcotics, Jafari-Dolatabadi told a meeting on social harms caused by narcotics, IRNA reported.

He further said out of 3000 requests made to commute narcotics-related sentences, 1700 have been reviewed and 1300 remain to be reviewed very soon.

Source: Tehran Times, July 4, 2018


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"One is absolutely sickened, not by the crimes that the wicked have committed,
but by the punishments that the good have inflicted." -- Oscar Wilde
Location: Urmia, West Azerbaijan Province, Iran

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