Iran continues crackdown on women as executions approach 100 for the year

Iran handed prison sentences to 11 activists defending women’s rights and has executed 98 people this year.

An Iranian court this week sentenced 11 women's rights advocates to prison terms totaling 60 years, as authorities in the Islamic Republic continue their crackdown against any type of dissent.

An Islamic Revolutionary Court in Rasht, the capital of northwestern Gilan province, handed down the sentences, which ranged from one year to nine years in prison, local media reported.

According to IranWire, the activists, 10 women and 1 man, were tried collectively in proceedings that began Feb. 29. They had been released on bail pending sentencing.

With the Iranian judiciary yet to report the sentences, the lawyers of the activists revealed them to the Tehran-based Shargh news network on Wednesday.

The activists were identified as Azadeh Chavoshian, Zahra Dadras, Zohreh Dadras, Yasamin Hashdari, Jelveh Javaheri, Negin Rezaie, Forough Saminia, Shiva Shah Sia, Matin Yazdani and a married couple, Sara Jahani and Hooman Taheri.

The charges leveled against them, according to their lawyers, included “forming a group to act against national security,” “assembly and collusion to act against national security,” and “propaganda against the system.”

The 11 activists were among 12 others detained across Gilan province during raids of their home by security forces in August 2023, a month before the one-year anniversary of the nationwide protests that erupted in response to the death of Mahsa Amini while in custody in September 2022.

According to reporting by several media outlets, including IranWire and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, the activists were subjected to physical abuse and beatings while in detention.

The 2022 protests initially centered on women’s rights but subsequently broadened to encompass calls for the fall of the Islamic government. Iranian security authorities responded by launching a violent crackdown against protesters and activists, killing more than 500 people and arresting thousands of others, according to the US-based Human Rights Activists News Agency.

Many of those arrested were sentenced to death, with executions continuing into this year. Iran Human Rights, an Oslo-based group, recorded at least 604 executions in 2023 and has documented 98 executions so far this year.

In an October report, Amnesty International said Iran had executed more than 5,000 people for a range of offenses over the course of a decade, between Jan. 1, 2012, and July 31, 2023. Those put to death included religious minorities, protesters and activists and members of the LGBT community. 57 of them were minors.

Iran ranks second, behind only China, in the number of executions carried out per year. Exact figures were not possible to obtain, but Amnesty estimated in a 2022 report that China had executed more than 1,000 people, while Iran conducted 576 executions that year.

On Wednesday, three people, including a woman, were executed at a prison in the city of Tabriz, in northwestern East Azerbaijan province. Iran Human Rights said the three, identified as Abbas Aghayi and Yasin Zolfaghari and his (unidentified) wife, were put to death for drug-related offenses.

Iran has faced growing criticism for its clampdown on civil and political activists. Rights groups have repeatedly condemned Tehran's use of the death penalty as a tool to instill fear among the population and repress any form of dissent. They have also called out most death sentences, asserting that they were issued after unfair trials and confessions extracted under torture.

Source: al-monitor.com, Beatrice Farhat, March 28, 2024

_____________________________________________________________________

Twitter/X | Facebook | Telegram | Contact Us

"One is absolutely sickened, not by the crimes that the wicked have committed,
but by the punishments that the good have inflicted."

— Oscar Wilde

USA | What happens in the final weeks before an execution? These reporters were inside the room.

The journalists behind ‘The Last 12 Weeks’ earned extraordinary access to a death penalty defense team—and faced difficult ethical choices Many defense lawyers are naturally cagey. They work in a pressure cooker, protecting their clients’ rights while fighting for the best possible outcome. And arguably, the stakes can’t get any higher than trying to save a client’s life. So no, defense lawyers don’t usually invite journalists into strategy meetings. But that’s what happened when Marshall Project reporter Maurice Chammah and Serial Productions senior producer Alvin Melathe spent the final few months before a Texas execution embedded with a capital defense team.

North Korea | 'I was only 9': North Korean defector recalls childhood memory of public execution

Kim Eun-joo was 9 years old when her teacher stopped their lesson and told the class to follow her outside. The children were marched to a public execution ground in North Korea. “I would cry even when our family dog died,” Kim said in a recent interview with The Korea Times. “But the first time I watched humans killing a human, I had no words for what I was feeling. It was the most brutal scene I have ever seen, in any movie or in real life.” The memory has stayed with her ever since. Now a human rights advocate after defecting from North Korea, Kim recently brought that childhood scene to the 9th World Congress Against the Death Penalty in Paris, where North Korea’s use of public executions and capital punishment was officially placed on the agenda for the first time.

19 July 1943 | Auschwitz's Largest Public Hanging: 12 Polish Prisoners Executed in Escape Reprisal

OSWIECIM, Poland — The SS carried out the largest public hanging in Auschwitz history on July 19, 1943, executing 12 Polish prisoners before other inmates as collective punishment for escapes and civilian contacts. The victims, all from the camp’s surveyors’ labor unit, were hanged on gallows built in front of the camp kitchen during an Auschwitz I roll call. The SS orchestrated this reprisal following prisoner escapes from the surveyors’ detail and unauthorized communication between inmates and civilians. Camp authorities used the recent escapes as a pretext to impose collective punishment.

Texas: The inmates who refused to die quietly and had to be gassed out of their cells before execution

Former crime reporter Michelle Lyons, who witnessed nearly 300 executions in Texas, US, reveals the desperate acts of death row prisoners who refused to accept their fate After spending years or often decades locked up in a tiny cell for 23 hours a day, most Death Row inmates go willingly to their executions. However, some refuse to die quietly - with officers forced to gas them out of cells, strap up their heads and even give chase across prison grounds. Michelle Lyons, who has witnessed nearly 300 executions in Texas, US, exclusively tells Sun Online how certain inmates "fight like hell" in their last moments. On most occasions, Michelle watched from the witness area, with the killers already on the gurney - the stretcher where they'd be given a lethal injection. Seven prisoners once tried to escape from the Row in Huntsville - with one shoving magazines and newspapers under his clothes to help him roll over razor-wire fences. Others have had to b...

Former Florida cop to be executed on same day as 80-year-old Pasco man

In an unprecedented move in the modern history of capital punishment, Gov. Ron DeSantis on Tuesday cleared the way for 2 executions to occur on the same day. DeSantis reset the execution of James Duckett, whose execution earlier this year was stayed amid efforts to secure DNA testing and analysis of evidence in his case. Duckett’s execution was reset for July 28. That is the same day previously set for the execution of Dominick Occhicone. Court records indicate that Duckett’s execution is scheduled for noon. Occhicone’s is set to follow at 6 p.m.

Japan: Capital punishment for a minor

Death chamber at Tokyo Detention Center The Supreme Court's recent decision to uphold the death sentence given in a lay judge trial to a 24-year-old man for murders he committed when he was a minor raises questions about the lay judge trial system and capital punishment. These include whether the lay judges correctly understood the spirit of the Juvenile Law in sentencing the defendant to death. It was the 1st death sentence handed down on a minor in a lay judge trial. The murders took place in Ishinomaki, Miyagi Prefecture, in 2010 when Yutaro Chiba was 18 - meaning he fell under the purview of the Juvenile Law. Chiba was convicted of entering his ex-girlfriend's house and stabbing to death the girl's sister and a female friend of the girl with a butcher knife, seriously injuring a male friend of the sister and abducting the girl. Prosecutors said Chiba killed the victims because they were trying to separate him and his former girlfriend. Since Chiba pleaded n...

Idaho | Death row prisoners sue over state's new firing squad

BOISE (Idaho Statesman) – Days after Idaho made the switch to a firing squad for executions, two Idaho death row prisoners next in line to be put to death sued the state prison system, saying its director withheld information about how she settled on the specifics for carrying out the method. Attorneys for prisoners Thomas Creech and Gerald Pizzuto filed suit this week in state district court against Idaho Department of Correction Director Bree Derrick. In the filing, they called her approval of an updated standard operating procedure for the firing squad and lethal injection as a backup method “arbitrary, capricious, or an abuse of discretion and in excess of the statutory authority of the agency.”

Florida executes Dennis Sochor

Man, 74, becomes oldest inmate executed in Florida in state’s 10th lethal injection this year Florida put to death one of its oldest prisoners in its history on Tuesday, a 74-year-old convicted murderer who was 1 of 3 older inmates scheduled for execution within the span of a month in the nation’s busiest death penalty state. Dennis Sochor was pronounced dead at 6:16 p.m. following a 3-drug injection at Florida State Prison near Starke, the office of Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis said. He was convicted of killing a woman on Jan. 1, 1982, just hours after meeting her at a New Year’s Eve party.

Oldest inmate set to be executed in Florida will face strict spending limit for final meal

An entire category of food is also off-limits for final meal requests in Florida Florida is currently preparing to execute its oldest inmate later today (July 14), a 74-year-old convicted murderer who has been on death row since the 1980s—but his final meal will be limited by a strict budget. Dennis Sochor is scheduled to be put to death later today, making history as the oldest inmate to ever be executed in the state. The criminal, who has been on death row for nearly 40 years, will be administered the lethal three-drug injection, with the process due to begin at around 6pm.

Florida | Former warden recalls botched electrocution that left him battling PTSD for 13 years and turned him into an abolitionist

Ron McAndrew anticipated it would be just another standard execution. He had been assigned to carry out the death of Cuban refugee Pedro Medina via electric chair within the confines of Florida State Prison. Fifteen years had passed since Medina's conviction for the murder of 52-year-old Dorothy James, and McAndrew's responsibility was to oversee the administration of lethal electrical currents to his brain. Having already supervised two previous executions using the identical procedure and raised in a community that strongly supported capital punishment, he expected a swift conclusion with justice delivered.

Death Penalty News

Search This Blog