Death sentence for prisoner accused of murdering under 18 in Iran
A prisoner in Sanandaj who committed murder before the age of 18 was sentenced to death by the Iranian judiciary.
Shayan Saeedpour, a defendant imprisoned in Sanandaj, was sentenced to death on November 1 of this year by the First Branch of the Criminal Court of a Kurdistan province. He was arrested in August 2015, when he was under 18 years old, on charges of murdering someone during a conflict.
HRANA News Agency, a news website for human rights activists in Iran, reported about this prisoner sentenced to death: In addition to his young age, there is evidence that shows that Shayan Saeedpour was under the care of a psychiatrist before the murder incident.
The defendant's lawyer said that Shayan's death sentence was issued despite the fact that, in addition to being a minor, he was under the influence of alcohol at the time of the murder, and two people testified to this in court.
The Iranian judiciary has previously issued death sentences for those who committed crimes as teenagers and carried out some of them. One example is the execution of 24-year-old Zeinab Sekanvand, who committed murder at the age of 15. The girl's execution received widespread coverage in the international media.
As a signatory to the Convention on the Rights of the Child, Iran is obligated to declare the death penalty for defendants under the age of 18 illegal, but the practice of the Iranian judicial system has repeatedly drawn strong criticism from human rights organizations.
Iranian authorities even rejected a request to visit the country by Javed Rehman, the UN Special Rapporteur on human rights in Iran, in October of this year.
Mr. Rahman stated that the purpose of this trip was to “gain a better understanding of the human rights situation in Iran.”
Source: Voice of America
