Iran continues to lead the world in the number of executions carried out against offenders who were convicted while minors, despite recent reforms and pledging more than 20 years ago to move away from using the death penalty for people under the age of 18, Amnesty International said in a new report released Tuesday.
In its 110-page report, titled, "Growing Up on Death Row: The Death Penalty and Juvenile Offenders in Iran," the human right's group said that the Islamic Republic hanged at least 73 juveniles between 2005 and 2015, including at least four last year.
"This report sheds light on Iran's shameful disregard for the rights of children. Iran is one of the few countries that continues to execute juvenile offenders in blatant violation of the absolute legal prohibition on the use of the death penalty against people under the age of 18 years at the time of the crime," Amnesty International's Middle East and North Africa Deputy Director Said Boumedouha said.
Amnesty, a leading advocate for the abolition of the death penalty, listed the names and locations of 49 juveniles currently facing execution, and the United Nations says that at least 160 minors remain on death row. The numbers are likely much higher, as Iran keeps such information under lock and key and never announces when a person who was convicted as a juvenile is executed, Amnesty said.
The majority of juveniles put to death over the past decade were convicted of murder, while others were executed for rape, drug offenses and threats to national security.
Iran has boasted laws recently passed that are supposedly designed to improve children's rights and has insisted that it doesn't execute anyone younger than 18. However, Amnesty said that the laws are actually attempts "to whitewash their continuing violations of children's rights and deflect criticism of their appalling record as one of the world's last executioners of juvenile offenders."
Iran still has laws on the books that allow "girls as young as 9 and boys as young as 15 to be sentenced to death," according to Said.
Hassan Hanizadeh, the editor-in-chief of the Meher News Agency in Tehran, told Al Jazeera that Iran "is a country of law and has an independent judiciary - unlike the neighboring Arab countries for example - which means that the Iranian legal system takes due diligence in its sentencing guidelines."
He insisted that those "executed were major drug dealers who were using Iran as a transit country to smuggle drugs into Europe and other countries."
"As far as Amnesty's report and other Western organizations that accuse Iran of illegally executing people, one must question the motives of these organizations before taking their reports as credible information," Hanizadeh said. "These international groups deal with these issues from a political perspective and often try to smear Iran's reputation out of political motives and political agendas."
A U.N. report from October found that Tehran continues to execute more individuals per capita than any other country in the world, hanging at least 694 people between Jan. 1 and Sept. 15, which likely puts the execution rate at its highest in some 25 years. By year's end, Iran had executed 966 people, up from 721 in 2014, according to the Iran Human Rights Documentation Center.
