UN expert accuses Iran of executing children despite rights laws

Iran executed seven child offenders last year and two so far this year even though human rights law prohibits the death penalty for anyone below the age of 18, a UN human rights expert said.

Javaid Rehman told the UN General Assembly’s human rights committee on Wednesday that he has “credible information” there are at least 90 child offenders currently on death row in Iran.

Mr Rehman, the UN’s special investigator on human rights in Iran, expressed deep concern at the overall use of the death penalty in the country, saying its execution rate “remains one of the highest in the world” even after a drop from 507 in 2017 to 253 last year. So far this year, he said, “conservative estimates indicate that at least 173 executions were carried out”.

He welcomed an amendment to an Iranian anti-drugs law in 2017 that led to the reduction in executions last year, but said “there is more work to be done”. He also said he was encouraged by the “enhanced dialogue” between the Iranian authorities and the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights “on the administration of justice and child offender executions”.

Mr Rehman said ethnic and religious minorities were disproportionately represented in Iran’s executions on nationalsecurity charges and among its political prisoners.

“They are subject to arbitrary arrests and detention for ... peaceful activities such as advocacy for the use of minority languages, for organising or taking part in peaceful protests, and for affiliation with opposition parties,” he said.

On the overall human rights situation in Iran, Mr Rehman cited several “distressing factors”, including a declining economic situation that he said was “worsened by the impact of sanctions, with serious consequences for the realisation of economic and social rights”.

The US has been tightening sanctions on Iran since President Donald Trump withdrew last year from Iran’s 2015 nuclear deal. Against that backdrop, Mr Rehman said, those calling for respect of human rights were “intimidated, harassed, arrested and detained”.

“Between September 2018 and July 2019, at least eight lawyers were arrested for defending political prisoners and human rights defenders, many of whom have received lengthy sentences,” he said.

Mr Rehman, a British-Pakistani professor of Islamic law, said journalists reporting on labour issues had been detained.

At least 32 people have been arrested since January 2018 for protesting against compulsory veiling laws, most of them women who in many cases faced harsher sentences than their male counterparts, he said.