Iran executed more than 500 people last year for drug-related crimes
By Benjamin Gilbert
Iran's government has been putting a lot of people to death.
The Islamic Republic executed nearly 1,000 prisoners last year, marking a high in the number of executions in the country in more than 20 years, and making it the country with the highest number of executions per capita in the world, according to a new UN report.
Issued by the UN's special rapporteur on human rights in Iran, the report said that the majority of those executed were put to death for drug-related offenses.
There was a "staggering surge in the execution of at least 966 prisoners last year — the highest rate in over two decades," UN Special Rapporteur Ahmed Shaheed said at a press conference on Thursday. A former foreign minister of the Maldives, Shaheed has never been allowed into Iran, but his report was based on 128 interviews with Iranians abroad and in the country.
"Under Iran's current drug laws, possession of 30 grams of heroin or cocaine would qualify for the death penalty," he said. "So there's a number of draconian laws."
People can be put to death for a range of 17 drug crimes, including armed smuggling, movement of drugs in prisons, or hiring people while conspiring to break anti-narcotics laws.
More than 500 people executed in 2015, or about 65 percent of those executed, were convicted of such crimes, many of them nonviolent.
At least four juveniles were among those executed, while 160 remain on death row, according to the report. Iranian law stipulates that girls as young as nine years old can be put to death, and boys as young as 15.
The Islamic Republic defended the executions by saying that "severe punishments meted out to large[-scale] drug traffickers have brought about considerable reduction in the harm resulting from the flow of drugs to Iran and beyond."
The report applauded the Iranian law that requires the country's Supreme Court to review all death sentences, but said it was concerned about the lack of due process and fair trial rights, including "long periods of incommunicado and pretrial detention, and lack of adequate access to a lawyer and/or to a proper defense."
It noted that drug offenders are often "subjected to beatings and coerced confessions which are later used in revolutionary courts to secure their death sentences. In some cases judges reportedly convicted and sentenced drug offenders to death based on their 'intuition,' and despite what appeared to be a lack of evidence."
The Iranian government was given the opportunity to review the rapporteur's findings and to have its replies included in the report. It refuted the assertions and said the reference to judges convicting suspects on "intuition" was "false and biased."
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