Official announcement of the third "public execution" sentence since the beginning of Farvardin
The Khorramabad Prosecutor's Office in Lorestan has announced the issuance of a "public execution" sentence for a person accused of murdering a police officer.
According to the Campaign for the Defense of Political and Civil Prisoners, Dariush Shahnvand, the Public and Revolutionary Prosecutor of Khorramabad, said, without mentioning the identity of the accused, that he killed an officer named Rahman Pourdehghan during a clash with the Lorestan police force in December 2011.
The news comes a few days after the Iranian Human Rights Organization warned on Wednesday, April 7, about the resumption of "public executions" in Iran after a year and a half hiatus due to the coronavirus.
Mahmoud Amiri-Moghaddam, the director of this organization, criticized the issuance of the death penalty in the Iranian judicial system as a punishment that "violates human dignity" and said that, contrary to the claims of the Islamic Republic's authorities, this type of punishment not only does not have a "deterrent element", but also leads to an increase in the "cycle of violence" in society and its goal is to "intimidate people."
The head of the Foladshahr Court in Isfahan also announced on April 27 that two prisoners accused of murdering an intelligence officer have been sentenced to public execution.
The issuance of death sentences in the Iranian judicial system and their public execution have been repeatedly criticized by the international community.
In his latest report, published in February 2019, Javed Rehman, the UN Special Rapporteur on Human Rights in Iran, called on the international community to hold the authorities of the Islamic Republic "accountable" for numerous human rights violations, including the "arbitrary" executions of 2018 and the suppression of the November 2019 protests.
He began his report by expressing concern about the significant increase in the number of executions, especially of defendants in "drug" cases, last year. In 2021 alone, at least 275 people, including two child criminals (Arman Abdol-Aali and Sajjad Sanjari), were executed in Iran.
According to this report, 40 of those executed in 2021 were Baloch citizens and 50 were Kurdish citizens.
According to Amnesty International's announcement in Farvardin 1400, Iran has the highest number of executions in the world after China.
Source: Radio Farda
